The Geek in Review Ep. 57 – Anne Tucker and Ben Chapman on Georgia State University’s Law & Business School’s Collaborate on The Institute for Insight

Transcript

[00:00:00] Marlene Gebauer: analytics and tech initiatives hang on thank God it started right after initiatives right I need my soundproof room again 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.

[00:00:37] Greg Lambert: And I’m Greg Lambert. Marlene, this week, we are going to be talking with Anne Tucker and Ben Chapman from Georgia State University School of Law regarding the university’s Institute for Insights.

[00:00:48] Marlene Gebauer: Greg, I spoke at the DLAW conference in New York City this week to a group of in-house counsel, lawyers, law firm business professionals and vendors. And appropriately, my topic was big data and legal analytics, which is what we’re going to talk about with our guests today.

[00:01:04] Greg Lambert: So what does the D in DLAW stand for?

[00:01:09] Marlene Gebauer: It stands for disrupt.

[00:01:13] Greg Lambert: Okay, gotcha.

[00:01:13] Marlene Gebauer: I really liked this conference a lot. It was hosted and sponsored by Momentum, Walther’s Clore and others. And what I will say is that it was small but really mighty. Unfortunately, I was going to give you some great quotes, but my notebook containing my notes from the first day was liberated from me.

[00:01:29] Greg Lambert: It’s riding the subway somewhere in New York City.

[00:01:36] Marlene Gebauer: Exactly. I’m sure the notebook is enjoying the streets of New York City right now. So I will do my best to highlight the themes. There was a focus on the future ready lawyer and what that looks like. And Walther’s Clore actually shared a report with attendees about that. Change management, both in adoption of tools and process, was also a theme. In addition to that, it was also about business culture change. I particularly enjoyed the conversation that we had about when business culture clashes with an organization’s security and legal needs. There were lots of this, is this right or wrong scenarios, and how things like the GDPR will change how we’re approaching information governance. Speaking of, there was a session on information governance and the different guidance proposals that are out there. There’s a lot, many more than I thought, all over the world. I saw a number of contract management and automation solutions, which were very cool. Since it’s me, I particularly liked the one that highlighted provision deviation. They had a scatter chart on that, like how often is the wording changing, which can impact how you’re going to draft. And the last theme was a new way of staffing and skills that are going to be needed. Definitely there was a team theme here and how, and I will say I was disappointed to hear how many times non-lawyer was mentioned. But allied professionals will be at the table and will provide the competitive advantage for organizations. And I’ll add one more thing. I learned at ORIC, they actually have a mindfulness position that somebody had moved into. So they have somebody who’s watching that. So I think that was great. I did sit in on a breakout session that was devoted to corporate legal optimization and automation. And the focus seems to be on obligation management, the contract life cycle, outside counsel fees and discovery costs. So that seems to be what the main focus for everybody there was. I did learn that there really is a huge opportunity to work together on knowledge, analytics, and tech initiatives. having a trusted advisor to provide feedback and even help implement projects will offer a real value to them.

[00:04:11] Greg Lambert: Oh, it sounds like a great conference. So is that, is it done annually?

[00:04:16] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I believe it is done annually. So you’ll have to look for it next season.

[00:04:20] Greg Lambert: Well, that’s great. Glad you enjoyed it. I had a firm retreat this weekend. I got to play guitar in my band.

[00:04:28] Marlene Gebauer: Very cool.

[00:04:29] Greg Lambert: I play guitar in a band every two years, whether they want me or not. So lots of fun. And we played every Doobie Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd song you could think of.

[00:04:39] Marlene Gebauer: I was going to say, what was your favorite? What was your favorite one?

[00:04:42] Greg Lambert: Oh, what was my favorite? We do a version of Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Breeze. where we introduce, we have one lyric or one verse that is about Jackson Walker Lawyers. So it was a lot of fun. So a lot of tongue-in-cheek in that one. Great bandmates. It’s absolutely a blast to do. And as I always say, I’m not very good, but I’m really loud. So you make up for it.

[00:05:07] Marlene Gebauer: You make up for it.

[00:05:08] Greg Lambert: I make up for it. All right, Marlene. Well, let’s roll into this week’s information inspirations.

[00:05:20] Marlene Gebauer: Do you need some basic introductions and helpful checklists to start your competitive intelligence work at your firm?

[00:05:27] Greg Lambert: It wouldn’t hurt.

[00:05:30] Marlene Gebauer: Then you will also be inspired by Kevin Miles’ article in the AAL Spectrum and reprinted in the On Firmer Ground group blog entitled The Power of CI Checklists. Kevin’s one of those CI gurus at Norton Rose Fulbright, and he not only walks through some of the checklists you’ll need for CI reports on people, company, litigation parties, industry, intellectual property, and other activities. He also provides some checklists formatted in MS Word. Very helpful indeed, folks.

[00:06:02] Greg Lambert: Yeah, I’ve checked that out. It’s pretty cool. I mean, it’s fairly simple, but hey, simple is sometimes what is it? Kiss? Keep it short and simple.

[00:06:16] Marlene Gebauer: Exactly right.

[00:06:17] Greg Lambert: Well, mine comes in from the U.K., and the Financial Times has a 15- article intelligent business report where they do 15 articles that are focused on the legal industry. And while the Financial Times is a U.K. operation, many of the topics they discuss in these articles are about the U.S. legal market. And there are two articles which highlight 10 people in each article who are shaping the legal market and the legal business technologists who are leveraging the legal technology to streamline the complex and repetitive world of legal processes. There’s an article on the big four shift to compete with big law, both in the U.K. and potentially in the U.S., and a couple of articles on the promise of technology versus the overwhelming nature of understanding and actually using the technology available to today’s legal professionals. It’s a great series of articles which are very relevant to our interview later in this episode. And while the Financial Times is usually behind a very strict paywall, this special report seems to be outside of that paywall. So enjoy it while you can.

[00:07:36] Marlene Gebauer: Well, that sounds like an absolute must-read, so I will get to it after we do this recording. Google Quantum Computer has achieved quantum supremacy. That is a quote. So using a quantum computer…

[00:07:55] Greg Lambert: Now I want to see the guy with the cape and the big, the evil guy coming out. That’s what I see when I hear quantum supremacy.

[00:08:05] Marlene Gebauer: Yes, very good. Well, using a quantum computer, Google managed to perform a calculation in just over three minutes that would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years.

[00:08:19] Greg Lambert: Wow.

[00:08:20] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah.

[00:08:21] Greg Lambert: That’s scary.

[00:08:22] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah. Now we’ve talked about quantum computing in prior inspirations, but that was more as, you know, kind of a futuristic thing. Well, no, it isn’t so futuristic.

[00:08:35] Greg Lambert: Welcome to the future.

[00:08:36] Marlene Gebauer: Exactly. You know, blockchain better be looking over its shoulder because quantum computers can break through its defenses.

[00:08:43] Greg Lambert: Yeah, it can. Yeah, that’s one of the first things that they’re talking about with quantum computing. is blocking, or rather, cracking the super security. So, yay, yay. And it’s, you know, does Google still have that do no evil?

[00:09:03] Marlene Gebauer: I don’t know. I mean, well, the way you look at it is like, okay, they do this, but then, you know, it just gives you the opportunity to do better. It’s like, okay, it’s out there. So now we have to find a better, you know, defense or a better solution.

[00:09:18] Greg Lambert: That’s true. That’s true. So we’ll have quantum computers going up against quantum computers.

[00:09:23] Marlene Gebauer: Exactly.

[00:09:24] Greg Lambert: Yay. All right. Oh, I’m going to throw one more in and I’ll try to make it quick. So there is an interesting, and I think it was a webinar that they turned into a podcast from Thomson Reuters, and it was run by law librarian David Curl, which they called Upskilling the Legal Profession, Addressing Today’s Legal Talent Gaps. Northwestern law professor and former dean, Daniel Rodriguez, and Legal Mosaic CEO Mark Cohen have a long conversation on the style of teaching at law schools and the need to shake things up. But there’s this lack of both, I think, internal and external pressure to help move the legal education into these new styles of educating students to be better prepared and be more proficient at the skills needed to practice law in the 21st century. As we all know, the legal education system is still based on 19th and 20th century teaching techniques. And I have to say, I have never met Daniel Rodriguez before, but I have admired his writings on topics, and I really enjoy his social media presence.

[00:10:37] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah.

[00:10:45] Greg Lambert: I have to say that he has a very strong personality that comes out in this interview. But as you listen to him, you can tell it’s much more of a passion that he has for the topic and his frustration, and in a way, he’s partly encouraged by the way the industry is leaning right now.

[00:11:27] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, and I mean, it’s okay to be frustrated, like these things are moving slowly. And I mean, if you’re passionate about something, you definitely want to see it move forward and get better. And sometimes the wheels move slowly. So, that’s okay. And that wraps up this week’s Information Inspirations. We are very excited to be speaking with Anne Tucker, the Faculty Director of Legal Analytics and Innovation Initiative at Georgia State University College of Law, and Ben Chapman, Executive Director of Legal Analytics and Innovation Initiative at Georgia State University College of Law, regarding the university’s Institute for Insights.

[00:12:13] Greg Lambert: Great, great title.

[00:12:14] Marlene Gebauer: Yes, I love it. I love it. You know, wonder why? Now, we have representatives from law schools on the podcast frequently speaking about tech and design education initiatives, and they are terrific. And we’re going to continue to have them on, particularly because at this conference that I was at, like a lot of people weren’t aware of what’s going on in the law schools. So, you know, I’m hoping we’re going to be able to make some connections there. But why this one is particularly interesting is that there is really not much programming and study devoted to legal analytics yet. So, Anne and Ben and their colleagues at the lab are really pioneers in this area. OK, well, welcome all. We’re very excited to have you here and to talk about legal analytics and their applications. Before we get started, I have to give props to the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at GSU for the name of their data analytics center, the Institute for Insight. I feel this is a place where, you know, one should make a pilgrimage.

[00:13:21] Anne Tucker: Sure. It is a great name. I have to tell you, I always feel extra important and smart whenever I get to say that when I’m speaking to groups. The Institute for Insight, I feel like it really ups my credibility. So, our partnership with J. Mack Robinson College of Business and the Institute for Insight, we’re going to talk a little bit about what that means. So, our partnership between the law school and the business school began with a colleague of ours who has a joint appointment at both schools. And in her research, had started to partner with some of the data scientists that are working at the Institute for Insight and seeing the application of new methodologies. So, with the spark of that one idea, our colleague, Charlotte Alexander, started thinking maybe there are others who want to use this. So, she reached out to several folks on the faculty, myself included, and it got the ball rolling. We started a legal analysis team. And we had a lot of people who were interested in this. One thing about the Institute for Insight is that there are several domain-specific labs. So, there’s one on FinTech, one on business operations, one on social media intelligence, and now we have one focused on legal analytics. So, with this idea of grouping folks with the same type of interest in the legal field, we started thinking about what we could do with that energy and with that talent. And out of that came opportunities to do some sponsored research for outside parties, development of our own research agendas, thinking about how we could offer classes for both JD and a master’s of science and data analytics students. So, we started thinking about what we could do with that energy and with that talent. And out of that came opportunities to do some sponsored research for outside parties, development of our own research agendas, thinking about how we could offer classes for both JD and a master’s of science and data analytics students. And so, sort of that one idea that like, hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we tried this? That was almost two and a half years ago now. And a lot has happened from that one, hey, wouldn’t it be cool idea.

[00:15:23] Ben Chapman: One of the things that was so interesting about this, and I think one of the things that’s a bit different about Georgia State’s approach to this, is that it really was the research agenda and continues to be the research agenda that drove the creation of the analytics and innovation initiative at the College of Law. And that’s because of this deep partnership with this research-driven approach that was happening at RCB, at the College of Business.

[00:15:53] Anne Tucker: Yeah, and I can maybe say one other. So, I think the narrative about, oh, it began with this idea. And now we’ve got a full program, these things that are happening. That, of course, jumps over a tremendous amount of internal stuff. I bet. Take it from like cool ideas to, you know, having a program that folks like Geek & Review want to talk to us about, which is super exciting for us and validating for what we’ve done. But of course that does jump over a ton of the steps in between. And I can say a couple of things, which is, in order to make this idea come into fruition, one of the things that we were able to do is apply for internal funding through our provost office. So, this is a program that I think is in part at least targeted to academics. Since this is a program that I think is in part at least targeted to academics, that’s a tidbit that might be interesting to folks. But we were able to apply for internal funding that was really competitive across the whole university. But we were able to apply for internal funding that was really competitive across the whole university. And with that, we received funding to hire two new faculty members. And with that, we received funding to hire 2 new faculty members. We also, through that proposal, were able to conceive of an executive director position, which is the role that Ben fills. We also, through that proposal, were able to conceive of an executive director position, which is the role that Ben fills. We were able to articulate like what this would look like and what we hope to do. We were able to articulate what this would look like and what we hope to do. And also, through making those proposals and talking to as many people, And also through making those proposals and talking to as many people, we saw an opportunity to take our research out of our own heads and our papers that we write and think about how we could create curricular opportunities out of that. we saw an opportunity to take our research out of our own heads and our papers that we write and think about how we could create curricular opportunities out of that. So, in all of those conversations, we were also pushed to, or maybe I should say encouraged, So in all of those conversations, we were also pushed to, or maybe I should say encouraged, to create a certificate program and some other curricular opportunities so that in a year from when we had that idea, to create a certificate program and some other curricular opportunities. we had a proposal, we had funding for which we were going to go out and hire, So that in a year from when we had that idea, we had a proposal, we had funding for which we were going to go out and hire. We had new programs that we were going to be launching in the next year or so. And that’s how it came to be.

[00:17:42] Ben Chapman: One of the things that’s really important to understand is sort of the entrepreneurial nature of Georgia State University. So, the idea with at Georgia State has been that they are an urban university providing opportunities to, in some cases, previously underserved populations. They are also the largest institution of higher education in Georgia with 51,000 students now. And since at least the mid-2000s and certainly since 2012, they’ve received significant positive notice based on their use of analytics in terms of student success, student retention, minority population advancement. So, at the university level, they’re primed to see the benefits of the use of data. That’s a good point. In a different context. But often these projects start out, there’s an old, a book that describes these projects as Lone Ranger projects. And you’ll have one faculty member who’s interested in one thing. And that is not, that’s not been the situation here at Georgia State. You’ve had faculty members who are interested, but that interest was married with an institutional drive to look into these areas to see how we could, how we could use them to benefit our students, our staff, our faculty.

[00:19:13] Greg Lambert: Well, that’s really smart because the, one of the things that we stress is knowing what your overall strategy is for your organization. and then making sure that whatever you’re working on works with that overall strategy. So it sounds like that’s exactly what you guys did.

[00:19:29] Marlene Gebauer: And it also sounds like we could, we could devote an entire separate podcast to how you had to, so how you had to sort of plan this and the steps that you had to take as well as the strategy. You know, we often talk about like what people are doing and it sounds, you know, as you’ve mentioned, it sounds great. But as also you pointed out, there’s a lot of work behind the scenes to get something like this off the ground.

[00:19:52] Greg Lambert: One of the things that we hear a lot about in the legal industry is the relationship between AI and innovation, but you’re addressing more of the analytics and innovation. So are those similar discussions or, or are they on two different paths?

[00:20:10] Anne Tucker: Oh, that’s interesting. I do think that they are similar. I think what we’re trying to do is two things. So one with analytics is we’re looking at a new methodological approach to quantitative analysis. And so that might be enhanced methods to generate the data that’s traditionally used in traditional quantitative analysis, but that can also be leveraging new quantitative methods like machine learning, the use of advanced algorithms. And so we think about that as encompassing the entire suite of computational tools that are currently available that are being envisioned right now. On one side, we think of it more of like the skills, the methodology, having an understanding about how that works on the innovation side, which is in truth a part that we’re still developing, at least in my mind, as I’m thinking about that is looking at changes in the practice of law and thinking about how is the practice of law advancing and what are the, what are the tools that are facilitating that advancement? And that can be at the individual level. That can be at the firm level. That can be across whole practice areas. And so there we’re thinking more about how others have brought some of the tools embedded in what we think of as analytics to market and a variety of platforms, services, and new approaches. Ben, I’m sure has something good to add here. So Ben, jump in.

[00:21:37] Ben Chapman: Please Ben, add something. No, how can I add anything to that? I think Ben has absolutely nailed it, but I think there’s another question I think that you are getting at, this idea of AI versus analytics. And that is actually, I think in our world, we prefer to say machine learning rather than AI. In our world, we really see analytics and machine learning as two sides of the same coin. We think that there’s a, what we see as a false dichotomy between statistics versus machine learning. They’re very much aspects of the same set of processes. And so we want to be clear about that. And in fact, our legal analytics, one course is very much a quantitative methods, traditional social science research kind of introduction to the field. We then build on that to build classification models or regression models in subsequent courses.

[00:22:44] Anne Tucker: And I think that that reflects, we talked a little bit about the cool name that the Institute for Insight has, but we haven’t talked about what it means. And it is a really, I think, extraordinarily great idea and that it’s not domain specific. So that the faculty members that are a part of the Institute for Insight have different backgrounds in engineering, in computer science, and in statistics. And with that cross-pollination of different backgrounds. So there is a deep tradition, at least in the Institute for Insight, and that’s carried over to what we’re doing, with an emphasis on traditional statistical methods as an important and integral part of what we do. Also, an important thing to note is the faculty members that we’ve hired and that are a part of our legal analytics initiative all come with some form of formal statistical training and then have taken that as a foundation and moved into machine learning applications in their own research and work.

[00:24:03] Marlene Gebauer: This is interesting because you’re sort of, you’ve set up my next question really nicely, so thank you for that. Why is this mashup of data scientists and accountants and risk management experts, you know, the math heads and the law school, so the scholars, why is this so important in the space of analytics?

[00:24:25] Anne Tucker: That’s a good question. So I’m going to answer it just with our own experience. that the problems that we are interested in our research and the problems that outside clients are bringing to us do not fit nicely within a single silo or a domain. And even what we might have thought of as, oh, this is a law question, when it involves thousands of opinions or cases, when it involves looking at all the docket sheets across all federal district courts, it becomes a subject matter law question, but a methodologically, a question that but a methodologically a question that can benefit from methods of other disciplines. And so I love that. I love that. I’m going to steal that. Please. It’s for the taking. I mean, this is so, we are just, I think that this all came about rather organically because the questions that are being brought, they start as one thing, but they implicate so many other aspects that to do a good job at answering the question as comprehensively as possible, we need a team of experts. We also think that this reflects how how organizations work, and even the law will work in the future. Complex questions require complex teams and a variety of skill sets, methodologies, and our own discipline-specific language and tools. When we bring those to bear on a single problem in a collaborative effort, we can answer so much more than we could individually. And so if nothing else, even if our students, the JD students, don’t leave here and become crack coders. Or programmers, which that’s not frankly the end goal for most of our students. We think if nothing else, they will have experienced what it is like to work in an interdisciplinary and dynamic team and to see how their subject matter expertise has grown in a way. Like law students can teach something to non-law students about the law. And they also learn something when they work with students from other disciplines. That as a skill, I think will be necessary as they go on to be leaders in their law practice and their organizations. And in their careers.

[00:26:38] Marlene Gebauer: This is interesting because you hit on a topic that we often talk about on the podcast, which is about teams and different teams bringing different types of expertise. To the situation. And lawyers don’t have to be unicorns. Like they don’t have to know all of this stuff or all of this stuff in a deep sort of way, but need to understand it enough to know that it’s important and need to bring in the appropriate people to help solve the problems.

[00:27:01] Anne Tucker: sort of way, but you need to understand it enough to know that it’s important and need to bring in the appropriate people to help solve the problems. So one other thing on that point, and then I think Ben’s got Ben’s got to jump in here. So the other thing is one of our goals too is to give law students a deep appreciation of the sophisticated skills that other disciplines bring so that when they are partnering with folks, they do not think that there is a button pushing machine out of which answers are just generated quickly, effortlessly, that there’s some sort of magic that happens. And I want them, we want them to see the, not the struggle, the struggle is real. But we want them to get, we want them to get an understanding of of how much work goes into that so that they can be participants in that and that they can also appreciate and then plan workflows around that reality. And so that is another benefit is it takes this idea of like, oh, isn’t that somebody else’s job? Can’t somebody else do this? All right, Ben, what…

[00:28:09] Ben Chapman: Well, I just wanted to add in that, of course, a critical part of this are the knowledge management professionals, the librarians and others. a critical part of this are the knowledge management professionals, the librarians and others who are also providing a whole additional aspect and critical contribution to this research. And in fact two of the courses that count for our certificate law practice technology and legal technological, it’s a long title, legal technological competency and operations. Those two courses are both taught by librarians, one by Chris Niedringhaus who is our associate dean for the director of the library in cooperation with the director of the law practice management program at the state bar. And so that gives us that, that exposure gives our students rather exposure to that profession, both the support that you can get from the library staff and then also exposure to commercial products and some of the other products that people within the state bar are seeing. And that also that our, our professional library staff is seeing. It is a multifaceted partnership as we try to turn out new attorneys who will be really conscious of the need for both emotional intelligence and teamwork in these projects where we acknowledge the contributions of all of the professionals that work together to create legal services in this new era.

[00:29:42] Greg Lambert: Well, and I like that you talked about making sure that they knew holistically what all goes into the process of analytics that they can’t just hit the easy button and make it. So and I think one of the things that we run into is that there’s a lot of talk that vendors that are producing a product tend to kind of gloss over that, you know, and there’s a lot of, there’s more PR than there is analytics or AI when it comes to some of this stuff. So how do you determine the projects that you work upon there at the lab? And then, you know, so you look at the project, then you have to look at the staffing and then you have to look at the length of time that it’s going to take. So what’s your overall process of on picking a project?

[00:30:32] Anne Tucker: Okay. Can I, I want to jump back. I will answer your question in just a moment, but I want to say one thing about one. This sounds counterintuitive, but one of our goals of the program is to invite some skepticism around this idea that there is an easy button and around platforms that over promise. And we want students to have the skills as lawyers to ask questions like what are your sources of data? How do you train? What’s the process? That they have the ability to ask intelligent questions that review. Chris Nedinghaus’s course specifically is focused on that skill on how to review. I think generally our courses invite lawyers to have the skills to do that. We have, I at least have some concern about ceding to the technologists and the statisticians authority, final authority over what will ultimately become a part of lawyers’ work product. As soon as we do that, lawyers become increasingly irrelevant. So, and they’re giving up a tremendous amount of their final work product. So I want to encourage them to have ownership over that process and bring that skepticism. All right. So in the question of picking the project, I’ll talk about it in two respects. One is for the lab class. So we teach a semester-long applied legal analytics lab that has JD students and students in our Master’s of Science of Analytics. In that class, we try and take a data-driven problem and solve it or get as close to solving it over the course of a semester. And for those projects, I don’t know if you can hear like the tone of my voice starting to get more stressed. Because that is truly how I feel as we approach these. It is so far outside of my comfort zone because it’s not a controlled environment. We have done external projects where we work with a, we do sponsored research for an outside client and we’re working with the client’s data. That has some pros and cons. It’s great for students. It provides the very real sense of stress of producing a work product at the end of the semester. And it feels important to students from the get-go. When we don’t work with outside clients and we do what we call an internal sprint where we take a research-driven question and answer it over the course of the semester. I will say in both scenarios we end up modifying what our end goal is based on our progress based on what we see. So we both accomplish maybe less than what we start out at the semester, but then in some ways accomplish more because we’ll go deeper on one question. In terms of picking the project, we are trying to pick an issue that provides an opportunity for students to engage with an interesting methodology. So we want there to be some meat for the analytics students. We also want there to be a substantive legal question that requires the law students to go in and analyze and work with the MSA students. And a lot of times that’s building either keyword based code that’s building training sets for machine learning classifiers. It is the law students translating legal concepts over to the MSA students. And it’s the law students getting familiar with the workflow, reviewing output, identifying errors, finding patterns, coming up with solutions about how to do this. This is an entirely iterative and collaborative process. We do have a break point at about week 12. So students then combine their work into a formal end of semester presentation that we run through around week 13 and then present in week 14. And so at week 12, we really stop exploration. And if we have not, it moves entirely to interpretation, synthesis, application, lessons learned. It is, as I said, out of my comfort zone, but also an incredibly engaging process.

[00:35:08] Greg Lambert: Ben, let me ask you, no one went to law school because they love math. How do you encourage or how do you engage the students in this program? Because most of them are, you know, they’re being told, you’re going to law school, your number one goal is to pass the bar.

[00:35:32] Ben Chapman: How do you entice them into doing this type of legal analytics course? Well, one of the things that’s really interesting about this is about 20% of our recent admittees have a STEM background. So again, in Atlanta, we’re fortunate that we get students who come to us with some sort of quantitative or scientific background. And we have been pleasantly surprised by the number of students who don’t want to lose that. They want to build on that. I think we have a pretty clear-eyed group of students. I’ve had more than one student come to me and say, I’m in law school, but I don’t know that I want to practice law in the traditional sense. So I want to hear more about your program. So with those students, you can have that conversation where you’re if that’s your plan, then you’re going to have to hone or develop these skills, and you’re going to have to build on those. The other thing that we’ve done, because we don’t want this to be, I don’t know, stats-lite, We don’t want this to be machine learning light. We have set it up so that students who don’t have a STEM background, if they want to get the certificate, they’re currently required to take six credits of math and computer science. And they do that during an intensive, or through an intensive set of foundational courses in the summer. Again, we’re in, these are early days for this program. We may come back and tweak that. We had six students who did that this summer. It has been a real bonding experience for them. It’s also interesting. I think that old idea of, okay, this is, you know, you’re in law school because you don’t want to do math. A good friend of mine, Debbie Ginsburg, does a presentation. They promised me there would be no math, and then points out all of the ways that, I mean, at the very least, you’ve got to calculate damages.

[00:37:35] Greg Lambert: Right. Well, I found it interesting that you said that you have a number of STEM students that don’t want to lose that, because one of the things we’ve talked about before on the show is the Generation Z that are now entering law school who are the No Child Left Behind class and the STEM, the engineering, mathematics, technology children that we’ve pushed them in that direction. And one of the things we’ve talked about is how are at first law schools and secondly law firms in the legal industry going to adjust to these young adults now. Or adult, I guess adults now, who are coming into the industry with these completely unique, or at least unique from previous generation educational processes that they’ve gone through. And so this is a really interesting approach to how you keep them engaged in that lifelong learning that they’re doing.

[00:38:44] Ben Chapman: And I think that’s such a good observation. When I sit down with these students to look over transcripts as they’re thinking about joining the certificate program, you know, they’ll say, well, I didn’t take XYZ in college, I had it in high school. I had AP Calc in high school, would that count? And I tell them, unfortunately, that’s not how the program is currently configured. But if you think back, at least to my education, that was much less common. And I think you really have hit the nail on the head that we do need to find some way to leverage those talents and skills. And that is one of the things we’re doing. We also, though, want to make very clear that even if you don’t have a STEM background, these are skills that can be acquired. And then our task and our challenge is making sure that it doesn’t look like we’re just forcing them to do this as some sort of hazing ritual. We want to make sure that what they learn in those classes is then applied in their subsequent courses. One of the ways that we’re doing that is we have a new blockchain course in the spring that will be taught by someone who works at AT&T, who is a lawyer but also holds 50 patents. And we have a number of other courses that are taught by adjuncts, but we are in the midst of hiring Georgia State, the College of Law, is in the midst of hiring someone whose primary focus will be cybersecurity. So we’re hiring a new full-time faculty member who will primarily work in that area. Again, there is this challenge for all law schools to decide whether you want to make this a focus and then to allocate necessary resources to make that happen.

[00:40:39] Marlene Gebauer: This is really interesting. I mean, you definitely have a very forward- looking approach in terms of your hiring and the professors you’re bringing in who have real-world experience to be able to teach students. Are they sharing real-world examples of how some of this education that they’re getting is applied? Are students being exposed to that? And are they coming back, you know, in terms of their own work experience and sharing the use of legal analytics that they’re experiencing?

[00:41:15] Ben Chapman: Well, I was just on a panel last week that, and it’s funny to see how these things evolve. Originally, it was an IP panel. A few years ago, it would have been strictly a career opportunities in IP. But this time, we had one of our grads who works in analytics for an international firm. And we had another grad who is in the privacy department of a very large company in Atlanta. But one of the things that is interesting is, of course, with the growth of privacy law, whether it’s GDPR, what’s coming in California, that sort of thing, or other regulatory regimes, they come back to us and they’ve quickly found, and it’s always wonderful to have a student come back, or an alum now, a graduate, come back and say, I was frankly surprised how relevant this was.

[00:42:13] Marlene Gebauer: Pretty soon, they won’t be saying that they were surprised. Pretty soon, they’ll just be sharing it as like it’s the norm. What is the ROI of the lab projects? And who’s using the data and how?

[00:42:25] Anne Tucker: It’s interesting. As an academic, I used to be happy if my mother read my work.

[00:42:31] Marlene Gebauer: We are too. We’re happy if our parents listen to the podcast.

[00:42:34] Anne Tucker: Yes, exactly. Actually, my parents, by the way, did ask if they could listen to this afterwards. So, mom and dad, here you go, guys. Hope you’re proud. So, it is an interesting mindset to be thinking about having a different responsibility for the work that we’re doing. So, when you say return on investment, I’m thinking about this in several different domains. So, in the first year where we had students taking our new analytics and experiential classes, ROI for me meant were students who were engaged in those classes, were they able to find jobs aligned with these new skill sets, and were they hired essentially for those skill sets? And we had amazing success with students getting placed at international law firms and positions of prestige, ones that they were really excited about and ones that they would not have gotten if they had not been exposed to these classes and these experiences. So, that’s ROI. One is student success stories, pathways. And that’s true for both the JD students as well as students in the Masters of Science and Analytics. So, I think about career paths as one. Another ROI indicator for us is student interest. So, that’s another metric of ours. And we’ve had a lot of student interest. Students have signed up for our certificate programs. These new classes that are scary and ask law students to deal with math, they still sign up for it. That feels like success. And each one of those students that we give a new skill to, that’s some kind of return on our investment. And then there’s two other ways that we’ve been thinking about this. One is, who is interested in our work and how can they use that? And in that, I think about the interest that we’ve received, particularly from the legal community in Atlanta. We have met with most of the major law firms now, either directly in person presenting to innovation or technology committees or meeting with leadership, talking to them as they think through what will they need to change about their practice going forward. And what talent do they need to recruit internally to meet the challenges and the demands of an evolving law practice and increasingly data sophisticated clients. So, that’s another, when a law firm wants to talk to you about your research, I feel like that’s an indicator that maybe you’re doing something interesting, if not also right. Out of that, specifically, we developed a workshop series for a law firm where we came in and worked in-house with their attorneys to try and level up the attorneys and give them the language to understand some basic concepts around text mining, machine learning, what is the technology that’s driving the proliferation of platforms. And from that basic introduction, we then did a more intense workshop on machine learning and then an applied learning day where we broke down the process of a workflow and how you would tackle a legal question from an analytics angle. So, that also felt like a great opportunity, not only to earn some financial return on investment in a dollar sense, but also an opportunity to showcase what we’re doing and be relevant to the local bar and community. The last way that I’ll say I think about return on investment is interest in the research that we are producing. On that ground, I think about that in terms of our larger projects. Are they going to be eligible for grant funding? We hope so. We have a current grant pending and plans for more applications. We also think about, are we able to not just be, I use this bad analogy, like a cat in a window batting at something shiny, but are we able to use these tools not only for their cool factor, but are we able to use these tools to address gaps in the literature to enhance public access to important legal data that will help them make better decisions about their civil litigation, about their investments, which is a research area of mine. We have larger aspirational goals than that. Are we doing research that matters, that opens up access to legal data, and that answers previously unanswerable questions because we’ve married our subject matter expertise with these new skills? So, to the extent that we’re able to do that, I think about that as that would be the ultimate return on investment in my mind.

[00:47:01] Greg Lambert: All right. Well, I’m going to ask the ultimate interview question here to wrap things up. Ben, where do you see the future of the lab? What are your expectations and goals for, say, the next three to five years?

[00:47:16] Ben Chapman: One of the things that we certainly want to build out, I, for years, was an IT director before transitioning into this role. So, the whole idea of forecasting five years out, that’s very scary. But three years out, at least, one of our goals is how is to make this part of the fabric of the law school. We want to avoid that thing where you’re exiled to the corner of the fifth floor, and it’s just those people. We want to build this into the fabric of the law school. And to that end, we’re exploring, I’ve been teaching some workshops, weekend workshops on various coding topics and some things like that. But that’s our primary goal. How do we weave this into the fabric of the law school? The challenge, I think, within three years is that if we do things right, and as we see the evolution of the market, it’s moving so fast. You look at the new tools from Lexis. If you look at Fastcase, if you look at Docket Alarm, you look at the speed with which things are evolving, this may just, without us even noticing, become built into our practice. And we want to make sure that we build that into the practice in a thoughtful way. And if we can do that in three years and have a self-sustaining, self- perpetuating program that is part of the fabric of the law school, then I think we will have succeeded. That’s our goal.

[00:48:53] Marlene Gebauer: I, for one, wish you well on that goal.

[00:48:57] Ben Chapman: So do I. It’s certainly been our pleasure to share some of our excitement with you. There’s a lot going on here. And of course, this whole field is just exploding. Then again, I’m sure you all have been doing this long enough to have seen many explosions and contractions.

[00:49:18] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, but I think this one’s a keeper. You know, it’s just, there’s too much out there that can be mined that we haven’t even touched upon yet. So this is just the beginning.

[00:49:33] Greg Lambert: Yeah, all right. Well, Ben Chapman and Ann Tucker from Georgia State University’s College of Law, the Legal Analytics and Innovation Initiative. I want to thank you both for talking with us today.

[00:49:47] Ben Chapman: Thank you both so much for having us on. It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you all so much for your interest.

[00:49:52] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, thank you. We really enjoyed it.

[00:50:00] Greg Lambert: Thanks for having Ann and Ben on. I have to admit, when we actually set this up, I wasn’t sure whether or not this was going to be just a purely academic style of teaching. But the fact that they are engaged in the actual community, working with companies there in Atlanta, working with law firms in Atlanta, is very exciting. And I think that they have their finger on the pulse of some real world examples of how you can help get these attorneys to be ready for the challenges that are going to hit them with legal analytics and with technology. I was blown away.

[00:50:47] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I was too. And I had known a little bit about what they were doing, but I really did not know the full extent when we came on to the show. So that was fabulous. And I really think they are kind of straddling both sides. They are looking at more academic types of initiatives, but also more business-related initiatives. Like you had mentioned, working with firms and that the presentations that they’re putting together for the Bar Association, those are things that are going to be very practical. And, you know, again, I’ll go back to the D-Law Conference. I mean, one of the major focuses was about data and getting your handle on data and how you can use the data. And, you know, the Institute is really focusing on this and basically giving you real-life examples of how you can do it.

[00:51:45] Greg Lambert: Yeah, it was great. So, once again, thanks to Anne Tucker and Ben Chapman from Georgia State University for joining us today.

[00:51:53] Marlene Gebauer: Yes, thank you very much. Hey, listeners, please take the time to subscribe to The Geek in Review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Rate and review us as well. If you have comments about today’s show or suggestions for a future show, you can reach us on Twitter at GabeauerM or at Glambert, or you can call the Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 or email us at geekinreviewpodcasts at gmail.com. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeSicca. Thanks, Jerry.

[00:52:30] Greg Lambert: Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, that wraps up another one. I will talk to you later.

[00:52:35] Marlene Gebauer: Okay, bye-bye, Greg. Don’t have to go too far. The songs of the earth on their way to rehearse at the Devil’s Backbone Bar. Hey, hey, don’t take me away. I can walk on by the North Star. But I fail to notice that it’s still daylight at the Devil’s Backbone Bar. The Devil’s Backbone Bar. At the Devil’s Backbone Bar. The Devil’s Backbone Bar.