The Geek in Review Ep. 108 – Lex Machina’s Karl Harris on the Past, Present, and Future of Legal Analytics

Greg Lambert  0:00

Okay, my, for some reason it went to like 8786 85 was like, Oh my God, we gotta wait a minute and a half.

Marlene Gebauer  0:09

Like that is entirely too long.

Greg Lambert  0:11

That is too long. I say we skip over and just get started now. Yeah, I agree.

Marlene Gebauer  0:23

Welcome to the geek and review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlin gay, Bauer.

Greg Lambert  0:30

And I’m Greg Lambert. So we talk a lot about legal analytics on this show and how legal professionals can leverage analytics to improve their processes. Whether that is the setting of the scope of the legal matters, the pricing and staffing of those matters, or predicting the timeframe of how long it will take to represent from start to finish of a matter. And we brought in one of the godfathers

Marlene Gebauer  0:53

He made us an offer. We couldn’t refuse.

Greg Lambert  0:56

One of the godfathers of legal analytics to the show today with Karl Harris from Lex Machina. We get nice and geeky as we talk with Karl about how he found his way to create an analytics platform and what he and Lex Machina are planning as they become more embedded in the overall structure of Lexis’ legal research platform.

Marlene Gebauer  1:17

I also wanted to wish everyone a Happy International Women’s Day, when we started the podcast, one of our goals was to highlight voices that aren’t often heard in the legal innovation space. So you know you did a quick tabulation and we have had 76 women on the podcast. I’m very happy about that number, and I look to increase it as we continue the series. So thank you to all of our female guests and allies.

Greg Lambert  1:44

So stick around for the discussion with  Harris. But for now let’s get to this week’s information inspirations. Our friends Jon Greenblatt and Bryan Parker from legal innovators have this just absolutely fantastic episode on their new podcast, the law in black and white. This week, they have former ABA president and a partner at your firm Marlene, Paulette Brown.

Marlene Gebauer  2:12

Yes, she heads our diversity and inclusion efforts at Locke Lord.

Greg Lambert  2:18

I just can’t tell you how much I loved this interview. And just the honesty and insights that Paulette just lays out there for everyone to hear what she said, Yeah, she is great. So she shares her experience of being a black woman and a big law setting and how she’s helped the ABA address the problems of race in the legal industry. But most of all, she talks about her life experience. And while black women in law firms are not a monolith by any stretch of the imagination. But despite years of trying to understand the barriers to success placed in front of women of color, the advancements are practically zero over the past 20 years. And I listened to this when I was in the car with my wife. And she was just nodding along as Paul at Brown was talking with Brian and john about some of the issues that she’s faced over the years. So it’s just an absolute must listen to the episode if you want a better understanding of race, gender, and success in the legal industry.

Marlene Gebauer  3:22

You know, it was absolutely great. And of course, you beat me to this inspiration. But I did reach out to Paula to let her know how much I enjoyed her interview and that we were using it as part of the inspiration for the pod this week. From the animals of COVID-related inspirations, I give you the distributed model of law firms. But now, I’m actually a little sad that we have not attributed a shape to this. But I guess that’s just for individual lawyers. So the distributed model law firms, Greg are becoming a bit of a thing lately. The distributed model firms are virtual, and they calculate their pay based on formulas based on billing and origination. They don’t do capital calls and they have no way to administratively slash salaries as many big law firms have done to preserve cash. And they don’t have the overhead of real estate and much staff. And their first commitment is to pay partners and then they pay for the firm based on what’s leftover. So of course if there’s a risk if the work dries up, you know, but there’s been a great deal of interest from big law attorneys looking for a change. Fisher Broyles is one example of a distributed model law firm. It has almost become an AmLaw 200 firm actually. So the firm says it brought in 91.2 5 million in 2019 revenue. Now that’s just 10 million shy of where the am law rankings place the 200th law firm in the country last year. The firm has hired 38 partners since the start of June 2019 and expects to hire another 35 partners by the end of 2020 in May lateral new hires were from Davis Polk and Wardell DLA Piper Seyfarth Shaw. And it seems these models attract more than just the lone wolf types, you know who manage their own clients work. At the Potomac law firm, about 35% of the firm revenue is generated by lawyers handling work on behalf of partners clients. Now in terms of compensations, the lawyers are paid in total, about 70 to 80% of the firm revenue, rainmakers get 20 to 30%. For work they originate, and lawyers who do the work earn between 40 and 52% of the revenue. This seems to shatter all the myths we hear about the need for the big law model to handle big law matters, the talents making the move, and it may not be long before the clients follow. Now, you know, if they would only consider profit sharing for staff.

Greg Lambert  5:55

Marlene, we are right at the one-year mark of the you know, we work from home phase of COVID. I think officially we early on said March 11 was the start because that was the day that Tom Hanks announced that he was infected with COVID. So and most of us, you know, we went home on March 13. And we never came back to the office. So but one of the things that has happened is that we’ve become much more comfortable doing zoom trials. So you know, it’s pretty much the primary way of holding hearings right now. And I watched something today that was just absolutely scary. And that was the situation in St. Joseph County, Michigan, where a prosecutor realizes during the time that she’s interviewing a witness via zoom, that the defendant of the case is actually in the same house as the witness is so Deborah Davis, who is the Assistant prosecutor, she was questioning a woman about a domestic abuse arrest of her boyfriend. And it turned out that the boyfriend was literally sitting only a few feet away from her. Davis immediately, like recognized it because of the woman’s behavior. And I watched this and I don’t know how she picked up on it. I just she has a sense that that is beyond mine.

Marlene Gebauer  7:15

This is not her first rodeo.

Greg Lambert  7:17

Yeah, that’s true. That is true. So Davis immediately asked the judge to verify that the defendant was not in the house. And there was a police officer that was on the call, he made a call out to some officers. I mean, it was literally just a few seconds later that the officer showed up at the house. And of course, the defendant was was trying to claim that he was not in the house. Luckily, you know, it, everything turned out, okay, and just the user and the judge. And he was just stunned by what had happened. And he immediately revoked the bond. And as the defendant was, was trying to explain to the judge why he was lying to the judge was telling you, Hey, keep your mouth shut. You know, you’re in a hole now. And first thing you need to do is stop digging a deeper hole. And so, but there, you know, there’s just things that you don’t think about happening when you can’t control the environment of a trial. And, you know, I will tell you that I was watching the same and they had me on the edge of my seat. And more than most horror thriller films that I’ve watched in a long time. And I can tell you, right, right now that Deborah Davis is the absolute hero of the story.

Marlene Gebauer  8:27

Yeah, thank goodness for Deborah Davis. I mean, I have many questions when I when I hear this, like, this is just crazy, crazy, crazy that this happened. And I just I have a lot of questions as to how that happened. Well, I have lots of questions. I just I have I have lots of questions.

Greg Lambert  8:47

Well, it makes me wonder how many times something like this has happened, and it wasn’t caught,

Marlene Gebauer  8:51

right. I mean, and certainly now and in you know, times of COVID sure it but I mean, it just it reflects even before COVID it just kind of reflects what you know, women who are who are involved in domestic abuse are up against so but in the vein of the online court, but in a more light hearted manner, or light hearted approach, the next time you zoom with your judge understand that that access may be costing them personally. In some jurisdictions, they do not have a budget for the court to host zoom calls. So the judges are paying for it themselves. So talk about an access to justice problem. I mean, even the judges can’t get on the zoom calls to hear things you know, and I’m I’m honestly I’m having a hard time understanding this because, you know, couldn’t some budgeted money you know, for things like parking and other court related expenses, you know, be shifted for a remote video platform.

Greg Lambert  9:59

Well As someone who’s married to a public school teacher, we understand about having to go out and buy things that you know, in order to get the supplies that you need. So,

Marlene Gebauer  10:12

um, yeah, okay. I haven’t, I’m still thinking about that. I’m still thinking about the judge. I’m still thinking about that whole thing. Yeah. Okay. And that wraps up this week’s information inspirations.

Greg Lambert  10:34

What’s not gonna was one of the early entries into the data analytics markets. And we asked one of the founders to come on and talk about his experience on working first on sonar systems where he had to take streams in signals of data and make sense of that. That turned out to be a launching pad for taking streams and signals of legal data and turning that into actionable data as well.

Marlene Gebauer  10:57

We’d like to welcome Karl Harris, CEO of Lex Machina units for geek review. Karl, welcome.

Karl Harris  11:03

Happy to be here.

Greg Lambert  11:05

So Karl, I’ve actually wanted to have you on the show for quite a while now in mainly because Lex Machina is one of the products that when people ask me, what are we using that deals with legal analytics, yours is the one that I get to point to, especially when it comes in relationship to legal research. So it’s great to have you on the show. But before we dive in to the analytics portion of the conversation, would you just mind just giving us a little bit of the history about yourself and how you ended up running a legal analytics company?

Marlene Gebauer  11:40

Because I’m sure that you decided that’s what you wanted to do when you were young, right? You were five years old. He’s like, that’s what I’m gonna do.

Karl Harris  11:47

That’s right by poster on my preschool wall said I want to run a little analytics company. Yeah, just kidding. Um, yeah. So it’s a it’s a good question, and fun one to talk about. So when I kind of talk about my journey towards coming to Google analytics company, I think about kind of three different moving pieces that kind of put me in this in this area. So one is a background in product and engineering. The second is background and entrepreneurship. And then the third is, of course, legal, in terms of product engineering. So my first couple jobs were as actual software engineer, so I used to spend my day all day every day writing code. So the first thing I did was actually really fun job is I built sonar systems for submarines, which is really cool is a sciency job, lots of distributed computing, lots of signal processing. And then to kind of plant the seed for later really, ultimately, a sonar is all about data processing and analysis, it’s about taking streams and signals and try to make sense of them in a way that a little different, you know, so you don’t run into things and such like that. But it is actually about data analysis. And then, you know, kind of the entrepreneurship angle. So you know, before Lex Machina that was part of the founding team of a company called Flurry, which ultimately was a mobile analytics company. And so the story there is, you know, if you think about using your phone or any other mobile device, you know, flurry can be embedded in those applications to help developers understand how people are using their product. What are the kind of click flows? And what is basic usage data for how people are using a mobile app. So a good kind of example is, let’s say you’re a game developer, and you’re spending all of your time on level four or five and six development, but flurries mobile analytics comes in and says, Hey, none of your users play your game pass level two. So really should be focusing on keeping people in the game rather than working on those other levels. So that was a, you know, my first kind of entrepreneur, entrepreneurial experience, that company was acquired by Yahoo. And then the third component is legal. So I have been to law school. I was an intern.

Marlene Gebauer  13:53

We’re sorry.

Karl Harris  13:56

It’s the least fun part of the story. I’m just kidding. I actually really like no,

Marlene Gebauer  13:59

you’re not really.

Karl Harris  14:03

Yeah, so I like law school love learning about the law. And you know, kind of those pieces coming together, like my background as a software developer, as an entrepreneur, and then knowing having this insight into the legal space from law school, and from briefly working as a summer intern at a law firm. That’s kind of my triangulation for how I came into legal analytics.

Greg Lambert  14:23

Okay. Well, Karl, you were that you were that person I sat next to in class so that I could just elbow and get the answer from. We appreciate you as on the other end of the bell curve are happy you were there.

Karl Harris  14:36

I’m always here to help.

Marlene Gebauer  14:40

So, Karl, we’ve heard from a number of guests over the years of the importance of legal analytics and law firms and how legal analytics is a hot employment opportunity for those looking for new work. How are you seeing law firms leveraging data analytics in their practice?

Karl Harris  14:57

Yeah, it’s a great question. And so you know, kind of Big Picture. answer for that is, you know, law firms are leveraging data analytics in their practice in kind of all facets, you know, to break it down into the most simple kind of components. If you think about a law firm, they kind of do two things. Number one is you try to get clients keep clients happy. And then number two is you try to win their cases and get get good outcomes for them. You know, whether that’d be in litigation, or m&a or whatnot, so getting clients and getting good outcomes for them? It’s simple.

Marlene Gebauer  15:29

So easy.

Karl Harris  15:31

Yes, if only everything was so simple. And so data and analytics from Lex Machina, and is really about those two things is winning business and winning cases. So like, for example, and Lex Machina, you can use it to, for a law firm to kind of showcase your particular expertise, you know, how much experience do you have in front of this judge? How much experience do you have working with this opposing counsel? Or how much experience do you have in this particular industry or space? To kind of prove with data? Why why you’re the right firm or attorney for a particular matter? And then on that kind of second component about winning cases, you can use analytics to figure out, what should your strategy be given your current situation, like in past cases like yours, at this point, what produce winning outcomes, what produce losing outcomes, and you can use that with data to help to help produce winning strategy as well.

Marlene Gebauer  16:20

So those are great examples. But I’m wondering if you can share with us what is what is the most creative example that you’ve, you’ve heard, just, you know, I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but what’s the most, you know, outside of the norm type of thing you’ve heard people doing with it?

Karl Harris  16:42

Well, I think, well, three kind of things come to mind. One, is something that may or may not be that fun creatively, but something we never anticipated, which is that lateral hiring is an important use case for Lex Machina and and you can do that for kind of a couple different things. One is, like I said, you can take a look at an actual attorneys track record with data and things like that. But number two is you can do a conflicts, analysis, you know, kind of right up front by going and looking and seeing, you know, who is this person representative they work with is they worked against. And so using analytics for that whole lateral hiring, both in terms of like selecting the right people, and also, you know, kind of doing like a pre conflicts check is something that we never anticipated with, but which turns out to be popular. Another thing that I think is quite creative, and is a, it’s kind of a growing industry now, is the use of analytics for litigation, finance, like when we started Lex Machina in a, you know, it was kind of conceptual, it seemed like something that might be done. And people used Lex Machina, to evaluate potential litigation for companies that you might be an investor in, but to actually be like a fund that finances litigation and actually invests in the outcome of litigations before those outcomes happen. That’s new. That’s a very fast growing industry. And I think that’s something that’s pretty creative, and out of the box. And then the last one, kind of the third thing that I’ll mention, this is actually story maybe before legal analytics, but it’s also fun to break down, you know, kind of how judges act based on like their current caseload or, you know, based on time of day and stuff like that, and one example, other serial x mock an example. But something that I love to tell is, somebody did some analysis on a particular judge and found that you do not want to be on the docket, running up to lunch, because judge gets hungry, maybe hangry, you might call it and give bad outcomes right before lunchtime. And all those things are kind of fun to talk about.

Greg Lambert  18:37

A lot of us on the operation side of law firms are looking for, you know, some type of competitive advantage, whether it’s setting up our pricing teams, some type of knowledge management, project management, process improvement, all of those How are are the moneymakers, you know, are the people that look to make squeeze more profit out of $1 revenue? How are they using your product to accomplish that goal?

Karl Harris  19:06

Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, and so when I think about kind of generating profit, there’s kind of two sides to it, one, which you kind of referred to, which is controlling costs, but the other side is, you know, trying to bring in more revenue. And so definitely answer the controlling cost side. But I will kind of point out that if you look at like analytics, and Lex Machina , and from a profit perspective, the first thing that comes to mind is generating more revenue because you can use Lex Machina in to kind of win more business, get more clients, keep more clients, happy, happy clients, any more business, new clients send you new business. And so managing to that kind of revenue side is is an important component. But in terms of like what you mentioned, which is, you know, kind of dialing down on costs and doing things more efficiently. I think analytics definitely plays a part in all different ways. It helps you be more efficient with your kind of recommendations to your client is what you should do and how you should spend your time. It can help you jumpstart a strategy. So for example, let’s say that you’re working on a motion to dismiss or something like that with analytics and Lex Machina, you could say, well show me the last 10 motions to dismiss in front of this judge that produced a winning outcome for my client, and start from there, rather from scratch. And we know that law firms, obviously, Greg Marlin do a lot of work on making sure that law firms have great internal knowledge management tools, analytics can kind of help bridge the gap. So you could imagine like, the ideal scenario is, you know, show me the last five motions that my firm one and then show me the last five that different firms went outside using, like Lex Machina and analytics, put that together, now, your jumpstarted into an effective place without spending all that cost all that time to like, find all that information and whatnot. And I think one more thing, which is, you know, to your point, Greg is, one of the important things that I think we try to do with analytics is convey the message, the analytics should be done on everything. It should be done on publicly available litigation data for federal and for state, it should be done on internal data that you have inside your own law firms. And just finding the right information quickly and efficiently is a great lever for driving down costs, especially when it you know, as it’s done by functions that you can’t necessarily bill out directly to the client, which the firm’s obviously internalizing those costs 100%.

Marlene Gebauer  21:29

So recently, Lex Machina, has integrated its platform into the overall structure of the new Lexis plus platform. And I believe that Lexis plus frame this integration as its fourth core pillar to the platform, in addition to the legal research elements, practical guidance and brief analysis features, so how does this shift? What Lex Machina’s  fourth pillar contributes to the other three pillars and vice versa?

Karl Harris  21:56

Yeah, so we were very excited about the Lexis plus litigation analytics launch earlier this year. And you got to doubt it’s kind of that fourth pillar. And what I think it really signals is bringing legal analytics into the mainstream workflow of every single attorney that’s doing work around litigation, you know, of those kind of four pillars that you mentioned. So the research, the practical guidance, the analytics, and the brief analysis, those are kind of in order of, you know, what have historically been the traditional workflows of attorneys, like legal research has been around for hundreds of years, right? You’ve always in a common law system, you always got to find the controlling law in a certain scenario. practical guidance is relatively new. I mean, it’s not that new. But providing like practical guidance products to help walk you through certain workflows is relatively new, certainly compared to legal research. And then brief analysis and litigation ellex are quite new. And adding that those as components into the core workflow of every day legal work is what litigation analytics is all about Lexis Plus, it’s all about being able to make high level assessments about what’s the behavior of judges, law firms, and attorneys, right in your existing workflow. And so, maybe one more thing I’ll add to that is, you know, kind of what it does for Lex Machina, Anna. So we’ve obviously we’ve grown a lot, we have a lot more users than we did is certainly in the early days, you know, we’re working with the both of you. But putting litigation analytics in Lexis plus, which will ultimately have hundreds of 1000s of millions of users is a major milestone in putting analytics into the workflow of every single person that practices law. And I think that helps the practice and ultimately will help like smoking. Because when you get analytics embedded into the types of things that you do, you realize all these new use cases that maybe you didn’t even know about, and you’ll come to Lex Machina and do kind of those sophisticated things that we talked about,

Marlene Gebauer  23:52

Karl, so I know Greg and I are quite familiar with Lex Machina’s capabilities with federal court analytics. But of course, you know, you know, we always get the questions like, Well, what about steak? Or what about steak? Or, you know, we really need state courts. So are there any developments on your end regarding state court analytics, which I know are a lot harder to do?

Karl Harris  24:15

Yes, they are harder to do. And the answer is yes, there are lots of good developments, which is that, you know, I would say our one of our core, if not our main core focus right now, is bringing more and more state core content intellects marketer. And so, you know, let me just kind of talk about that in two different ways. So one is, you know, you mentioned you’re familiar with our kind of federal offering, and we’ve kind of reached a major milestone last year, and that, you know, all of the, what we call kind of commercially viable cases, and Pacer, our intellects market, which means all civil litigation with the exception of, you know, like prisoner rights petitions and individual Social Security cases, which you know, we’ll eventually get to but not a lot of large law firms are handling those types of cases. And so We feel like we’ve reached a major milestone for federal, and the next frontier is state. And the way that we think about state is that because the various state courts and this can even vary county by county, although some states have, you know, broader systems, you have to be able to analyze the documents in state court, because you can’t rely on the docket, like what the clerk’s actually entering, because it can be sparse, it can be inconsistent. And it’s just, it’s unreliable. I mean, I like to joke I used to come spend a lot of time complaining about Pacer. But now I love it .Because

Greg Lambert  25:40

there we are, I used to work at the Oklahoma State network that had all the state dockets there, trust me, I know the difference between what one county puts in another county Yes, and and how just different they can be.

Karl Harris  25:55

Exactly. And to that point, the truth in the documents, though, what actually gets filed as kind of like an order, you know, a brief or a filing and stuff like that has the ground truth, both in terms of what happened, but also who was involved, right, the party is gonna be listed on their law firms, we listen there in trays and listen in there. And we now have the capability to process those state court documents in mass. And so we’re focused on rolling out what we call the biggest kind of state courts, which is a focus on counties that have over $80 billion in GDP and 1 million in population, which are kind of like the big commercial centers in the US. And we’re focused on rolling those kind of state courts out at a clip of about one a month. And so yes, lots of exciting stuff. We’re very excited to be rapidly expanding into state court. And stay tuned for lots more releases over the course of this year. Exciting.

Greg Lambert  26:52

Well, Karl, I wanted to have you kind of pull out your crystal ball here on this next one. So what are you saying, because we’ve talked with a number of people that have talked about cloud computing, Ai, natural language processing, all of these powerful tools that are out there? And so what are you seeing as some of the potential value or changes in the legal industry in the near future, due to some of the improvements, say, in data analytics itself? You’ve got the data analytics, Ai, computing, processing power and storage with cloud based systems? You know, there’s the this idea of using analytics that tells you what the judge is going to do. I mean, that’s so 2019. Now, so. So what what’s the next block to fall in, in legal analytics? And how intelligent and smart Do you think the computing systems are going to be?

Karl Harris  27:57

Yeah, it’s a great question and a really fun one to talk about. And I think that you know, my answer that kind of with with two kind of separate buckets, so one is you mentioned, like trying to figure out what the judge is going to do is kind of like 2019, I think that the where we’re going to get to is a point where you can imagine like AI systems, giving you advice about what you should do kind of at each step in your workflow. So for example, imagine like a soup to nuts scenario where you’re trying to win business from a particular client. And your tool is like, Well, hey, here’s the things that you should showcase. Here is this particular prospective clients past litigation track record, here were good outcomes they got here are bad outcomes that they got here with the law firms that they work with here. Here’s the law firms, they work with their, here’s what you should be telling them as to why you should be their particular client kind of spoon feed you that. And then as you work through and you know, intake, and you work with them on a litigation, or m&a, or whatnot, each step of the way, you’ve got a little kind of AI system on your shoulder saying, okay, here’s where, yeah, here’s what you should do next. Here’s what other things have done in the situation. This kind of takes a more proactive approach in guiding you through the process than right now where you kind of got to know like, Hey, here’s my tools. Here’s what I should be doing here. Here’s the way I might use it there. You know, maybe you forget it. Like it’s only the law firms that are really great about kind of systematizing process that have widespread adoption of analytics. And I think that moving the AI in the direction of more like a proactive assistant is kind of the next phase and getting that integrated in folks workflow.

Marlene Gebauer  29:37

I’m gonna say clue. I’m just gonna mention Clippy here. I’m just I’m just gonna go. But no, I actually did have a point because I was thinking about what you were saying there. And, you know, I look at like Excel where they’re sort of offering you suggest and you have your data there and they’re offering you suggested types of charts based on what you’re trying to do. So It’s almost like, you know, what are you trying to do? And then it will, the system will go ahead and do that for you.

Greg Lambert  30:07

Yeah, so you did it differently. I was imagining a little AI devil on one shoulder. Rather.

Karl Harris  30:17

I like that you got the competing shoulder purchase. But yes, to your point, Marlene, that’s exactly right. As opposed to, you know, right now, where you’re saying, well, I’ve figured out what I want to do. And now I want to get the data to support this, or I want to use data to figure out what I should be doing. It’s a system, it’s just a more general analysis saying, like, hey, I want to win this person’s business. And the system says, Well, here’s what you should do. Or I want to decide whether to write this particular motion to dismiss system says, Well, here’s all the factors you should take into account, etc, etc, etc. It’s exactly what you mentioned, like what the Excel, which is, hey, I want to compare two things. Well, why don’t you try a pie chart? Why don’t you try buy a truck? Like, that’s a great analogy. You know, one of the thing that I might mention about this, since, you know, it’s kind of related to the topic is, me and Greg, maybe, you know, I’ve chatted about this in the past, but I like, love the topic of our should people be afraid of, you know, these AI systems, you know, like taking their job, or, you know, to your point about, you know, driving cost efficiencies and things like that. And ultimately, my answer to that is, you should not be afraid, because when you think about like, are we at a point where AI is going to replace, like, actually legal mind or a lawyer? I mean, the answer’s no. But I do think that lawyers that use AI are going to replace lawyers that don’t use AI. So in that regard, it’s it’s not about like, as come in and take all your take your jobs, but it’s going to be a component in a successful lawyers toolkit in the subsequent years.

Greg Lambert  31:53

Yeah, I can see that that’s kind of a common theme that we’ve talked with other people that that are using or developing AI tools, is they give kind of the same answers, like for those who had just the world’s going to be great for those that that, that they can, they can work around it and not use it. They’ve probably got another thing coming to them. So.

Marlene Gebauer  32:16

And I think what we’ve what we’ve also talked about, and you know, I think what what we have found, you know, in our work is that as you show these types of tools and the capabilities to different people, and they do start adopting them, then they come up with Well, can it do this? And can it do this, and I want to do this and, you know, sometimes it can and sometimes it can’t, but it moves the conversation forward is and so they find other uses and other ways. And so there’s there’s more work, actually, as a result of being able to dig down and see things in a different way with the analytics. That’s right. When you can do new things, there are more things that you can do. That’s right. That’s a good that’s that’s a good way of putting it. That’s that’s and that’s a good way to wrap this up. I think.

Greg Lambert  33:03

Well, Karl Harris, we appreciate you taking the time to come on and talk with us.

Karl Harris  33:08

Yeah, thanks. Great. Thanks, Arlene. I enjoyed it.

Marlene Gebauer  33:14

So that was a lot of fun talking to Karl. You know, I’m glad we finally got him on. We’ve talked about it for a long time and just schedule never, never allowed it. So that was good. And I you know, I love that he was he was willing to he was game to talk about, like, you know, what are some of the really odd things that that we’re talking about? Because, you know, those are the things I think people want to hear and kind of have that aha moment like, Oh, yeah, I never thought about that, you know?

Greg Lambert  33:42

Yeah. And it was, you know, it’s really interesting to see how they’re embedding the new product or Well, I mean, obviously, Lex Machina has been around probably almost 10 years now at least, and getting it embedded into Lexis and Lexis Plus, you know, there’s a lot of interesting things on the horizon for them, but I have to go back to something he said at the very beginning, and that was when he worked. One for a flurry one. It made me hungry for an ice cream from dairy. I

Marlene Gebauer  34:15

was gonna say, like, flurries,

Greg Lambert  34:18

or is that McDonald’s? I can’t remember I think McDonald’s has

Marlene Gebauer  34:21

Dairy Queen isn’t Dairy Queen

Greg Lambert  34:22

Fleur. Yeah. But but it was it was really interesting talking about and i and i think that while he was talking about the gaming industry, I think it applies to the legal industry as well. And that you’re bringing in these developers to work on levels three and four and five, and you still got all of your people still working people like

Marlene Gebauer  34:44

don’t make it past the levels like

Unknown Speaker  34:46

they don’t worry over game over and over and

Marlene Gebauer  34:49

I’m just like I am frustrated because I can’t get past this. So So

Greg Lambert  34:53

yeah, I thought that was just a really good analogy and I think it really applies with the especially what we’re looking at for Data Analytics and what we’re actually able to kind of comprehend and process. So it was great to hear that part as well.

Marlene Gebauer  35:07

Yeah. And I kind of love this, this idea of, you know, maybe in the future, we’ll be able to basically say, this is what I’m trying to do. And the system will be smart enough to be able to take your data and do that for you. Because I know, you know, I know oftentimes, you know, people want to do it, like they know what they want to do with it, but they don’t know how to execute it. Yeah. And this, this will be easy.

Greg Lambert  35:30

Now they have that little angel and devil AI sitting on their shoulder. They have tell them what to do.

Marlene Gebauer  35:36

I don’t care what anybody says. I like Clippy. I miss him.

Greg Lambert  35:40

I miss Oh, all right. Well, thanks again to Karl Harris, from Lex Machina for taking the time to talk with us.

Marlene Gebauer  35:46

Thank you, Karl. Before we go, we want to remind listeners to take the time to subscribe 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 @gebauerm or @glambert or you can call the Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 or email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thanks, Jerry.

Greg Lambert  36:19

Thanks, Jerry. Alright Marlene, I will talk to you later.

Marlene Gebauer  36:21

Bye bye.