Marlene (@gebauerm) and Greg (@glambert) talk with the University of Oklahoma School of Law’s Director of Technology Innovation, Kenton Brice. Kenton discusses how OU is leveraging the advances in technology to expand upon the university’s commitment to not only teach students how to think like a lawyer, but to also have a grasp of some of the skills needed to practice law efficiently.


The Geek In Review also received a nod from The Legaler Blog as one of the best legal podcasts right now. Thanks!
Of course, #ILTACon18 was a smashing success for those who attended. Checkout the tweets for some of the ideas shared at the conference. Also, congrats to David Hobbie for pulling together a great show.
Just when you thought you figured out the Millennial Generation… get ready for Gen Z. This new generation is now old enough to start law school. The more you know, the better prepared you’ll be in adjusting to this well connected, vocal, and empowered generation.
All this and more on this episode of The Geek In Review.
Don’t forget to subscribe( iTunes, or Google Play ), rate, comment, and most importantly, share this podcast with your friends!

 

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer 0:00
I’m still going,

Greg Lambert 0:00
you’re still gonna open

marlene gebauer 0:16
Welcome to The Geek in Review, podcast designed to cover their legal information profession with a slant toward technology and management. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert 0:24
And I’m Greg Lambert.

marlene gebauer 0:25
Well, Greg, I have a couple of fun stats to share with you and our listeners. All right, we passed our 2000 Listen milestone for The Geek in Review.

Greg Lambert 0:34
That’s outstanding.

marlene gebauer 0:35
Not too shabby for a GarageBand podcast. Can you believe it?

Greg Lambert 0:40
I can’t believe we’ve even been able to get one of these podcasts out at all.

marlene gebauer 0:43
I think we should give a big thank you to all our listeners and subscribers. And yes, if you haven’t subscribed, what are you waiting for?

Greg Lambert 0:51
What are you waiting for? Go

marlene gebauer 0:52
do it. Go do it now. You’ll feel so much better that you did.

Greg Lambert 0:56
I know I feel better already.

marlene gebauer 0:58
We also want to thank Lila for including us in the list of best legal tech podcasts right now. That was a delightful discovery last week, and we greatly appreciate it. The CEO of legal or Steve jassie is also the host of legal meats podcast and we encourage you to check that out. So Greg, I wanted to share a couple things this week. All right, Caraway. All right. Let’s Tara microsystems presented the 2018 inaugural changing lawyer awards at ilta, which and I quote, recognize and celebrate those individuals and organizations which have best embraced and champion change. First, congratulations to the winners, including CaseText. But Greg, I noticed that the only law firm professional titles that are recognized or CIO and lawyer

Greg Lambert 1:40
Well, that’s because that’s all that’s in our law firm, right? Right.

marlene gebauer 1:44
Now I know there are many CIOs and lawyers who embrace and champion change, but they aren’t the only legal professionals that are responsible for change. What about Leaders in Knowledge Management or legal project management? I can tell you they are often the drivers of change more so than the technology department.

Greg Lambert 2:01
I have to agree with you there.

marlene gebauer 2:02
And since staffing was a big theme at Ulta this year, what about leaders and Talent Management? I’m not suggesting at all that there should not be an award for lawyers and CIOs or that those selected were not deserving. They absolutely are. But innovation is not technology. And technology is not innovation. Amen. So I hope next year, the awards are more expansive,

Greg Lambert 2:25
wouldn’t hurt to expand them out.

marlene gebauer 2:26
And Greg ilta. All I can say is wow, yeah, it was very impressive. Yeah. It’s like lots of lots of good feedback. And sounds like everybody had a great conference. I’m going through all of the tweets and bookmarking the stuff I want to follow up on. And it sounds like there were a lot of good ideas shared a couple of clips I’ll share with you joy. Russia’s favorite quote from the keynote is demographics is destiny. Now, this is close to my heart, because you know, I’m a sucker for metrics and analytics. And I do think they are the destiny of any information professional. Another one that caught my eye was from David Hobbie. He tweeted something John Fernandez mentioned, talent management changes may be the most important part of innovation in the legal industry. And I have to say, I am agreeing with that.

Greg Lambert 3:12
I also want to give a shout out to David Hobbie, because he was kind of the mastermind behind this year’s AALL. To absolutely so and he put on a heck of a show. So well done, David, congratulations.

marlene gebauer 3:23
And the last point I wanted to note was I saw something related that Dan Lena had said that law schools are having to prepare operationally aware attorneys now which segues so nicely into what today’s guests cat and Bryce has to say.

Greg Lambert 3:40
I agree. Before we jump in, I wanted to talk about the fact that we just hit the one year anniversary of Hurricane Harvey and its devastating impact on Houston and Southeast Texas. That’s right. I remember this time last year being on daily leadership calls with my firm’s attorneys and administrative leadership, discussing the damage to the city, the Houston office, and more importantly, the overall impact it was causing to the people of the firm whether they were our Williams and Lee outsourced staff, our firm attorneys or Equity partners, anyone. The concern went out for everyone and it was an amazing display of camaraderie in the face of adversity. It also showed flaws in disaster recovery programs. After all the best laid plans fall apart once the floodwaters start to rise around here. I talked with a few people at multiple firms after things settle down. And one of the biggest and most solvable problems during Harvey was the fact that people did not take their laptops or their tablets home with them the day before the hurricane hit that

marlene gebauer 4:43
that just is amazing and crazy because you knew it was coming Yeah, it’s not

Greg Lambert 4:47
like it’s a tornado that may pop up and you have to leave or a fire and you have to get out a hurricane. You can everybody saw it on the weatherman. I saw a comment just like with a lot of security flaws. The physical ones can be the biggest hurdle to overcome. I know it sounds crazy, but if people forget to take the physical item with them during an event like Harvey, it undermines the entire plan. So long story short, don’t forget to undock your device and take it home with you in a disastrous happening, noted, Marlene. Now we can get into the interview with Kenton Bryce and discuss some of the ways that the University of Oklahoma is integrating technology skills into the process of not only helping law students think like a lawyer, but also to have some understanding of the technology that they’ll use in the day to day activity of actually practicing law.

marlene gebauer 5:34
Great. Let’s get started.

Greg Lambert 5:50
Today’s guest is Kenton Bryce. He’s Director of Technology Innovations at the University of Oklahoma School of Law, which is my alma mater, Marlene. Yes is Ken, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Kenton Brice 6:03
Thanks. Glad to be here.

Greg Lambert 6:04
The University of Oklahoma has jumped in with both feet on teaching advanced technology skills to his law students, I want to know what or who drove this idea there that students need to understand the technology involved in the practicing of law, rather than just the traditional Socratic method of teaching them how to think like a lawyer. Yeah,

Kenton Brice 6:23
absolutely. Great question. So really, the market drove it, you know, the recession really affected legal practice, like you’ve never seen before. So our dean, Joe Harris, and our director of libraries, Darren fox came together and created our program based on main campuses, the University of Oklahoma’s Digital Initiative. And then we took their idea for creating digitally savvy students. And we applied that in the law school setting. And we’ve been growing ever since. And that was four years ago, we have now kind of created something all of our own in that four years that has become a model for the entire university itself.

Greg Lambert 7:03
I like the idea of one never led a downturn in the economy, go to waste, an opportunity. And to note, no need to reinvent the wheel, leverage some existing program that’s going on, especially when you have the support of a giant University behind you and leverage that to bend it into your own process there. So how are students coming to grips with this? Is it something that they’re excited about? Or is it something that they just see is another task to get through the three years of law school?

Kenton Brice 7:39
That’s a great question, because I first got here three years ago, and who was starting the second year of the Digital Initiative and the current students at the time, I feel like they felt it was just another task through law school. Last year, we doubled our numbers and attendance at all of our extracurricular sessions. So everything we do is extracurricular. Well, most I say 90% of what we do is extracurricular. When we started this in 2015, we saw maybe 1400 to 1500 student attendances at these events. Last year, we had over 3000. And so the students are starting to realize the value of this, the more they go out over the summers into practice and go into their firms and go into their government work, and they come back and we get it all the time. We need more, we need more, you need to train us more. Our attorneys are now telling us we are supposed to help them move forward

marlene gebauer 8:33
with some of the specific feedback that you’re getting from the students when they come back.

Kenton Brice 8:37
We have great stories. So coming back from the summer, we have students say say hey, I was the person in the firm that knew how to use trial pad. Now they want me to come back and train all their lawyers how to use trial pad in the courtroom, or it’s you taught me how to use Microsoft Word at proficient level. Now I am the guy at the firm who knows how to use Microsoft Word and they want me to show them how to use it. We’re seeing our grads come back and that’s one piece right? We have one piece of technology they’re really good at they’re proficient at from their training programs. And then there’s also this whole like I had a student that moved out to Midland, Texas to work for a pretty established firm and she told I took her to a tech show back in March and she went because the firm has already told her you are going to help us revolutionize what we do leveraging technology that you’ve learned about and so we have just numerous stories every year that come out we don’t have any This is what my next project is to get kind of quantitative data around this right now. It’s all anecdotal but the stories we’re getting back really energize us every year. See

Greg Lambert 9:39
that’s the difference between academia and law firms we would just totally go with the the anecdotal stories for you guys really liked it. Let’s let’s jump in here and get get some stats on this. But

marlene gebauer 9:52
I love this idea that the firm’s that are the organizations that the students are going to are really recognizing the value of the knowledge that these students are bringing and want them to teach some of the more seasoned people. And so you know, I’m imagining like the season, people are sort of sharing their knowledge about the practice of law. And then, you know, these, these students and up and comers are sharing what they know. And like everybody’s better word in the end. Absolutely. That’s

Kenton Brice 10:16
our total hope. The reason I do my job is to help the legal profession move forward as a whole, it’s not, you know, I want to go teach and make my name great. What I really want to do is see the entire legal profession and Oklahoma surrounding region, and the nation stepped forward a little bit into what lawyers would probably consider a massive abyss of the unknown. And so and I’m just trying to gently say, It’s okay, like, there’s some cool stuff out there, you can leverage just to be that more efficient to capture more of the market, and hopefully, maybe start leveraging some of that to create more access to justice, which is also a piece of this,

Greg Lambert 10:52
I’m glad you mentioned in your in your anecdote about the student who was proficient in in Word or Excel and then was told to come back and help them. You allow me once a semester to come via video and talk with the do a lunchtime presentation to about 50 or so students that show up with your new higher usage statistics, I’m going to expect 75 The next time that I talked to him. What I cover there is about learning some of the basics. You know, I tell him learn to Microsoft Office products, learn Word, Excel, Outlook, learn Adobe Acrobat, once you learn those, which you’re going to be spending about 90% of your time using in the first couple of years. Anyway, if you’re seen as an expert in those, then you’re going to be given the opportunity to take on those advanced product tools. What are you teaching them as far as the basics, I know, they may think it’s boring, but in a way, some of that stuff that you can do with some of those office products, or Adobe is actually kind of cool and exciting. They just don’t know it yet. Pivot tables.

Kenton Brice 12:03
So that’s it. That’s a great point. And Greg, I do have to really thank you for talking to our students every semester, you know, I am now into my fourth year here. And so I feel like the newness of being out of practice has kind of worn off for the students. Now they look at me as like, you’re just another guy who works at the law school, you don’t know what it’s really like in the real world anymore. So we like to have people like you, Greg, come in and talk to our students tell them what they really need to know because it just reinforces what we’re doing. But those core production tools, right, the Microsoft Office Suite, a professional PDF resource, whether it be Adobe Acrobat Pro, or like docs, core PDF, we heavily trained on those, and those are our most well attended training sessions. So we do talk about emerging technology. We do talk about blockchain, we do talk about artificial intelligence, we do talk about virtual reality, how that’s going to change courtroom presentation. But the what we really do focus on is are those core production tools. You know, in two weeks, I’ll be doing what’s called Word week, where I do five straight days of Microsoft Word training, starting with the basics, like how to use I mean, I think they’re basic how to use a style all the way to how to start automating some of the processes with macros.

Greg Lambert 13:16
Word week, sounds almost as cool as library we

Kenton Brice 13:21
definitely so cool. But our students are really taken to it. There’s a story from my first year here that really highlights how they’ve come right how they progress because I was in April, and I had a three L and I was doing a Microsoft Word training, just showing them how to use Styles and build out a table of contents automatically with headings, right? Pretty simple stuff. And this poor girl sit in the second row, just her her jaw dropped open. And she was like, I spent four hours last night manually doing everything on a brief, you just told me I could do it in 10 minutes. And it immediately became real to her right. This is not just something that Professor Bryce or one of our other trainers sit around and just talk about because we think it’s fun. It this has real world implications like I tell my students go to sleep, right, be done with your work and go to sleep. You’re already busy enough.

marlene gebauer 14:10
That’s a great example of efficiencies and how you can use the technology to more efficiently do your job and get some sleep. Well, we’ll

Greg Lambert 14:19
have to point this particular segment out to Casey Flaherty, because this is all he talks about, as far as being efficient,

marlene gebauer 14:26
right? Absolutely. And I’m wondering, you know, you’re talking about, you know, some of the Microsoft training, you’re talking about blockchain training, how do you think it’s going to prepare students for practice? And you know, maybe the question is, how do you envision them practicing based on the type of training that you’re giving them? I mean, do you envision people being more more client facing? Do you envision them being more support roles or both, or something entirely different?

Kenton Brice 14:52
That’s a hard question to answer because every student’s lifecycle through their career is going to be different whether they go into a small firm reply dictate how that that would come out. Because if you’re a small firm, because I was a small firm, I manage the technology for four to five people. And we leverage tools to be more efficient, so that we could be more client facing so that we could spend more time with our clients to prepare for depositions. So that we could spend more time preparing for trial, instead of doing the same contract over again, from scratch, it takes us eight to 10 hours. So in a small, firm environment, you know, I think these those are the ones that if they could just become more efficient, they could probably spend more time with their client, because they’re already super busy. Same with a larger law firm, similar, but what I really want for our students that go into larger law firms is to start thinking, what are what are the processes in this firm that could probably be more efficient? And where are the tools that what tools exist, that we can plug in, you know, for our students, I want them to start thinking about technology about how it can improve their practice, no matter where they go, and it’s gonna be a different flavor for wherever they land. I had two students over the summer that work in the state government office that is still satisfying certain things manually, like a FOIA request. And it’s a process and they have to go through this process. And and they’re not leveraging anything, just man hours, I showed them how to use a document management system. And they’re just sitting there saying, why aren’t they doing this? And, and my response to them is, you guys go be the agents of change, like you go back to that office and tell them this system exists. Why don’t we figure out how to implement it on top of our already existing process. My goal is not just core production, don’t get me wrong, core production tools help students think through things more efficiently. So if you tell them, there are tools out there, learn how to use them. So whether it be Microsoft Word, whether it be the latest and greatest artificial, intelligent tool, you still have to know that that tool exists, how to use it, and how that plugs into your process to make it more efficient. Yeah,

marlene gebauer 16:52
I love that you do that, that it’s it’s not just about the tool does your it’s about thinking about how tools can improve the entire process, you know, in terms of practice, and I think that’s so very important, because very often the focus is on the tool, like this tool is going to do everything for us. And it’s like, no, it doesn’t, you really have to think about how you want to apply it in your environment. Yeah, absolutely.

Greg Lambert 17:16
So how does this program help in recruiting new law students? Do you find students are excited about this? Or is it something that you introduce after they’re already there,

Kenton Brice 17:26
a little bit of both. I do have students that come in this past year, actually, because we just entered a new class last week, and I had a five or six specifically come up to me and say, I’m here because of this program. I’m from Arizona, I’m from Colorado, I came to law school at University of Oklahoma, because I know what you guys are doing. So we have that. There are those students that are here, because you know, their father went here, their grandfather went here, and then they really catch the bug a few weeks in, and then there are those students that will maybe never catch the bug. They came to law school because they want to be Luddites, I gently come alongside them for the next 33 months and encourage them in other ways, at least right? Where Yeah, and that’s what I talked to the students about. It’s like there’s multiple levels of basically what we’re doing here, right. One is just straight up exposure. We want to make sure you understand that this stuff exists. These are issues and it’s not just the core production pools, but it’s also you know, we have Darla Jackson talk to our students about trust accounting, and client portals

Greg Lambert 18:27
Darley Jackson’s with the Bar Association now, right? Yeah. So

Kenton Brice 18:31
not anymore. She was until a few weeks ago, and now she works for us. And so not for me. She actually is one of our new research librarians, but

Greg Lambert 18:41
Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, they’re always good people. I’ve known Darla for a number of years.

Kenton Brice 18:45
Darla, when she did work for the Bar Association, we’d have her come in once or twice a semester and talk to him not just about technology tools, but trust accounting, trust accounting is one of those areas that lawyers always get into trouble. Oh, yeah. And so if we can just help them understand that that’s an issue and that there are tools to help you, but part of its exposure, these issues exist, and then that next level would be some training, then that next level would be competency, that next level of mastery. And so that’s what we’re really looking for my hope is that every single student that graduates from here, at least is exposed to the reality of the modern law practice. It’s not just, you know, the Perry Mason moments in the courtroom anymore, that maybe that’s why they went to law school in the first place.

marlene gebauer 19:26
I’m wondering if they they kind of come out of this understanding that maybe, you know, going back to the Socratic method comment that thinking like a lawyer is is maybe changed now?

Kenton Brice 19:37
I think so. You think like, I remember, while it’s a law school, we were told you need to we’re gonna teach you how to think like a lawyer. And so there’s critical thinking skills. Yeah, absolutely. But maybe it’s right. And so your critical thinking is about legal issues and how to serve your clients in a case or in a transactional matter. But why can’t we critically think about the processes of our firm? Why can’t we critically think about out how our business actually operates so that we can serve our clients better. You know, it’s

Greg Lambert 20:05
not school, teaching law students is not a zero sum game. It’s not if I teach them technology, that means they’re going to be thinking less like a lawyer, it’s in addition to thinking like a lawyer, they also have to know practicalities of running a law firm or knowing how to deal with the client or knowing what gets you into trouble with the trust fund. Or

Kenton Brice 20:25
even even thinking like a lawyer of litigation in 10 years is going to look completely different. The type of evidence presentation, or just the type of evidence in general is going to be natively digital. And so if thinking like a lawyer is how to coal through a bunch of loose leaf documents to find that nugget of information, well, what happens? You know, we’re seeing this in ediscovery. All the time, what happens when you have 2 million documents? What does that mean now? So

Greg Lambert 20:53
you mentioned that litigation in 10 years is going to be completely different than it is now especially in production of evidence, what are you exposing the students to that helps them understand some of this potential change? And what are you seeing that’s really cool in the market right now, as far as practical tools that are coming online, for trial lawyers, for the

Kenton Brice 21:17
past three years, we’ve really kind of developed this program, and now our faculty are really starting to take hold. And so I have a faculty member who teaches litigation skills courses, and he asked me to come in about five times in the semester to come talk to students about different technologies in the courtroom, not just in the courtroom, but also pre litigation, discovery, and maybe client interaction or investigating your own client or investigating your opposing party as information changes, where it’s almost natively digital. Now, you know, I don’t send letters to my insurance company anymore, I have a chat window, that most likely I’m interacting with a bot and then after I exhaust that, I’m gonna go and talk to a real human, but I’m not actually going to send a letter anymore. So what does it mean to interact with a chat bot? Because every company is going this way or not? Every but most companies that are understand how customer service is interacting with a more modern age is going this way. So what does that mean for litigation? What’s that mean for discovery? We have a record of a chat. But how is that Chatbot? programmed? How was it designed? It’s just a small example here. But if our students understand that technology has lawyers, they’ll know what questions to ask when they get out, they’ll know when to ask for an expert. And so that’s another thing I talked about, you know, you don’t have to be the expert in all this. Just understand that this exists. So that you know to go get an expert sometimes. Yeah.

Greg Lambert 22:33
Now as far as actual tools or things that you’re seeing can kind of give me some some cool things that are happening in the market or are coming on to market things to watch for.

Kenton Brice 22:44
Yeah, so. So for the actual really cool tools. So logical is a really cool ediscovery platform. I know if you play around with logical or talk to them. So they’re trying to take the traditional EDRM and turn it into software as a service mentality. And they talked to our students last April, and our students were like, wow, that’s really interesting. Really cool. So I thought they were pretty cool. The legal research is changing. It just is and Westlaw just announced Westlaw edge that there are certain tools in there that will change how you approach research, where you’re getting better information faster, you know, CaseText kereta. AI is a similar tool, Ross intelligence, Eva is a similar tool. Artificial Intelligence is the one piece of technology, I think that is really going to change how practice operates. I was in Chicago at a one day artificial intelligence conference in June, and this company called LegalMation, was there and LegalMation on Have you seen them. I have seen them Marlena See, smiling, like that student that showed that I showed how to use table of contents in Microsoft Word that was me in that conference, like, my jaw dropped open, because I used to work in California. And I used to have to do answer generation. So what LegalMation does is you upload a complaint, and then two minutes, you have an answer with all your affirmative defenses and your initial discovery request. And it was scary. Good. Yeah. So I see that and I say, Hold on a second. What does that mean for our students? What does that mean for the student that was going to be a young associate at a law firm in LA that doing employment law, let’s say Ogletree Deakins or somewhere like that, and they were counting on having billable hours to draft answers and discovery requests? What happens when there’s a system that can do it in two minutes instead of 10 hours? And do they understand how that works? How does that change how we educate our students? Are we should we be training them on how to look and analyze this material instead of how to draft it?

marlene gebauer 24:41
And as you said before, kind of be the experts in this space and be able to educate others? Absolutely.

Kenton Brice 24:47
If you can go into a firm and say, Hey, I know you have a bank of 20 young associates doing all this work, but did you know our competition is doing this? And yeah, and then they’re providing better quality services to the client, like more high value services to the client. And so LegalMation That one is the most recent one I saw that really made my jaw drop open. That’s really a cool system. Okay,

marlene gebauer 25:11
so now that we’ve scared everybody with that response, I’m gonna go back to what we were talking about a little earlier. So you read and hear that clients are wanting their attorneys to use innovative solutions that solve their real world problems. But that often, these solutions aren’t very complicated. There’s something that’s very simple and promotes efficiencies. So I know you’re teaching the students about some of these common ways to solve to solve problems, or you also teaching them how to basically engage or find out from clients, what it is that’s gonna solve their problems, and being able to communicate that to others in the firm. So

Kenton Brice 26:00
we do have certain classes here that teach like how to talk client, you know, a lot of this is about serving clients about the business of law. And it’s not necessarily leveraging technology to figure out how to solve a client’s problem. But hopefully, that’s the piece of all of law school, right. So all of law school should be centered around how to create the next great generation of lawyer. And that means how to critically analyze problems no matter what the problem is, and then come up with solutions, whether simple or complex, like an efficient solution. So I don’t see it. As you know, I’m teaching a technology tool. It’s more of the whole experience of law school. I mean, that’s what it means to think like a lawyer, I think. And so I do teach a course, I taught one this summer with Jim Callaway from the Oklahoma Bar Association on Law Office Technology. And part of the emphasis of the course was communicating with clients to help get them to engage. So you know, we do it more from like, you need to be using a tool to communicate with your clients that make sure you’re preserving confidentiality, that makes sure you’re keeping your clients data confidential and private. And so what does that really mean in the modern day is email really a safe medium to talk to your client, probably not. Even encrypted email that came out a few weeks ago or a few months ago is not really that safe. And so let’s let’s talk about client portal, a really simple solution to communicate with clients that other industries have already adopted wholesale, right? When I talked to my doctor, it’s through a client portal. So why aren’t lawyers doing this, but that’s also the attorney highlighting either to the client one of two things, one, we really value your information. And two, I’m going to teach you that the modern era is not as safe as you think it is with your data. And so hopefully me as your lawyer, it’s a value add when I’m also using these solutions, because I’m also telling you emails, not what you think it is. So in essence, our attorneys are turning into kind of technology, or just more security and privacy conscious lawyers. And that’s just an added benefit to their clients.

marlene gebauer 28:02
Part of the reason I asked the question is there’s there seems to be sort of growing opportunity for attorneys and firms to work with their clients jointly on solutions. And, you know, using, you know, some of the technology that that’s out there, you know, either recommending it to clients or working together with clients with with their existing technologies to kind of have this looser communication method that you’re talking about.

Kenton Brice 28:31
That’s a great point, because actually, this was yesterday, I did the office 365 Bootcamp for our students. Were you listening yesterday? So one of the questions I had from one of the students, and these students are actually way more engaged already this year than last year. And we see that every year. But one of the questions I had from the students, as I’m talking through how to use Office 365 tools in enterprise way was well, can my client use that installation with us? So they’re already thinking this way? And so we talked through that, like, how do you could you create an environment that your client is actually you know, a pseudo member of the firm, so to speak, in office 365 environment through permissioning, and user access rights, where they are you they are part of the news feed of the firm of their case, and then you can see what they can see. And maybe you want to limit that in some areas. So, of course, but they’re already thinking that way, you know, and these are what else these these are people that have been on the ground for four days. So it’s inspiring. It is actually the question came to me, but I really had to pause and just reflect on our students are coming in already thinking this way, right? They’re already thinking, how am I going to interact with my clients? How am I going to work with them? How am I going to integrate them more into the life of our law firm but we’ll see I mean, these it was a really a kind of a moment yesterday where I was like, Wow, are students really are starting to think differently than The law student 10 years ago,

Greg Lambert 30:01
it’s, it’s interesting because we’re coming to the tail end of the millennials, and you’re getting into the Gen Z, probably in the next two or three years, you’re gonna get your first batch of people that were born in the 21st century. I know, everybody’s making me put that put a pit in my stomach to just thinking about it. But you know, it’s each each generation comes to the table with with pluses and minuses. I think the the millennials aspect of of how to think holistically is something that that you’re seeing kind of tying up now there’s kind of a maturing of that, and now get ready for the next generation to come in and completely turn everything upside down. So they’re going to be demanding all kinds of technology, because they’ve never known anything different. Yeah.

Kenton Brice 30:52
And you know, it’s, it’s also being part of a community. And so these generations, they really, I was reading something about the new generation, I’m not sure what we’re calling it yet after millennials and

Greg Lambert 31:03
Gen Z is the is that the term is a placeholder. Okay, Gen Z

Kenton Brice 31:08
placeholder. They are way more community minded, like for a local community, and I was thinking about that for Norman, Oklahoma, where we are and what we’re doing. But we think that from a business perspective, you’re going to want your clients to be part of something right part of an online community. Does your law firm have a client slack page? Or slack? And how are you making sure they feel connected to the community of that law firm? And there are definitely tech tools that can provide that and they already are providing that, you know, they’re flocking to that stuff like GroupMe apps are just a dime a dozen now.

Greg Lambert 31:43
Now I feel old.

Kenton Brice 31:44
Me too. Thank you for bringing that up.

Greg Lambert 31:48
The reason I know that you’re about to get them is because I have a junior in college right now who’s like on the front end of that generation? And it’s it’s different is but you’re right, I think they are community focused. And it’s not just necessarily the physical community, it’s an online community of other like minded people, for better for worse. You know, that’s, that’s what the next group is going to be bringing in. So I’m glad at least one of us is thinking about how, how do we how do we get ready for that, that new community minded generation, and I want to thank Kenton Bryce, the Director of Technology Innovations at the University of Oklahoma School of Law, again, Marlene, my alma mater, case, case, I didn’t tell you that. So thanks again for joining us today. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you again.

Kenton Brice 32:39
All right. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Greg Lambert 32:51
Marlene, it was fun talking with Ken Bryce from ODU. It was wasn’t it, it really is interesting to see all of the things that they’re doing. They’re at, again, my alma mater,

marlene gebauer 33:01
I was really impressed him.

Greg Lambert 33:02
One of the things that I want to focus on after that interview is again, this new generation that is just now entering law school, I think I told Ken, they’re a few years away, they’re really on him, I looked it up and 1996 is the new generation Z. So anyone born after 1996 is of this new generation. And I’ve looked it up online, I’ll put a link out for this define this new generation who are now 22 years old and two years younger. It talks about them as individuals. These are people that think that other people should have the freedom to be whomever they want to be. They’re empowered, this vocal and unbounded generation believes that they can do and accomplish anything and they view themselves as change agents who has the responsibility to better the world around them. And if you need to, can’t wrap your head around what this type of generation looks like, I think you can look at the vocal students after the Parkland shooting. Exactly. That’s who is coming in to law school now, so be prepared. Well, Greg, what’s up, Marlene

marlene gebauer 34:05
got surprised. What’s the meaning to the podcast again,

Greg Lambert 34:09
I know I’m so happy. I wasn’t sure if we were going to be able to do one together again. But we did. We snuck in a late Tuesday evening and got this thing knocked out. For those of you that enjoy The Geek in Review, make sure that you subscribe on iTunes or your oven. If you don’t enjoy it, subscribe. There we go. If you do enjoy it, make sure that you rate us and leave a comment so other people can find this as well. Again, I want to thank Ken Bryce at University of Oklahoma for joining us.

marlene gebauer 34:39
Thank you getting and as always, thanks to Kevin MacLeod for his original music.

Greg Lambert 34:44
Yes, thanks, Kevin.

marlene gebauer 34:59
Whoo

Transcribed by https://otter.ai