Sarah Sutherland from CanLII joins us this week to talk about her new book, Legal Data and Information in Practice: How Data and the Law Interact. We have a fun and informative discussion about how the legal industry, ranging from courts, firms, law schools and start-ups are leveraging data within their organizations and how new technologies are allowing us to do amazing things with data that we could only dream about a few short years ago. While many of us in the law understand the messiness of the data we produce and collect, however Sutherland points out that there are many industries where the data is messy, and they are using that data to increase the value of the services they provide.
That being said, there are still a number of ways in which we create and collect data that need improvement to support current and potential uses. Leveraging data in better ways helps the legal industry across the spectrum. Whether that is the large law firms assisting global corporations, or helping individuals with access to justice needs. Sutherland’s hope is that a legal industry that has better structure data results in better outcomes for everyone needing legal services. Sarah recently wrote about a hypothetical law firm where she quantified the value of improved information and data.
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Information Inspirations
A recent leak of confidential court records in California from Tyler Technologies, Inc.’s Odyssey Case Management System is having a wider affect that the court initially thought. It turned out that third party data collection also gained access to the information, including attorney disciplinary records and juvenile records. In addition, no one is really certain if the leak was limited to just the California courts.
Lex Machina and LexisNexis recently released their latest Law Firms Activity Report, which surveys the most active law firms in federal district court.
You know what we are missing? Another Law School in Florida! Enter The Jacksonville University College of Law to become Florida’s twelfth law school in the state.
You know what else we have been missing? Legal Explainer TikToks. But now we have them thanks to Harvard Law Spouses, Maclen Stanley and Ashleigh Ruggles, both 2018 Harvard law grads, They published a book last summer called The Law Says What?: Stuff You Didn’t Know About the Law (but Really Should!), and a TikTok page spun off of the book. Perhaps we need a Geek in Review TikTok page?? Or, perhaps not!!
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Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert.
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Music: As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
Transcript
Marlene Gebauer 0:15
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
Greg Lambert 0:21
And I’m Greg Lambert. Well, Marlene, I kind of made a promise out on Twitter without necessarily running it by you first.
Marlene Gebauer 0:29
Yeah, I saw that.
Greg Lambert 0:33
So, next week, while we’re at LegalWeek, I kind of I kind of mentioned that we are going to try and do a live episode while we’re out there. So and I thought it’d be kind of cool to do it, because next week will be our 150th episode if we if we are able to pull it off.
Marlene Gebauer 0:50
Yeah, you know, I’m always up for a challenge. And this is really a good stretch goal. You know, plus, it seems from Twitter that a lot of folks really want us to do it.
Greg Lambert 0:58
Yeah, yeah. Well, I saw a lot of people want to drop in and bomb us. So…
Marlene Gebauer 1:04
I think that’s great.
Greg Lambert 1:07
Well, we’ll try and pull everything together. So if you if you’re interested in listening to a live show, look for more information on Twitter as we tried to make my unilateral promise of reality.
Greg Lambert 1:22
Well, this week, we have Sarah Sutherland from Canley. She joins us to talk about her new book, Legal Data and Information in Practice: How Data and the Law Interact. So we have a really fun and informative discussion about how the legal industry ranging from courts and firms law schools, and startups are leveraging data within their organization, and how new technologies are allowing us to do amazing things with data that we could only dream about a few years ago.
Marlene Gebauer 1:53
So stick around for that. But now let’s get to our information inspirations.
Greg Lambert 2:00
Well, it seems that the state of California had a major leak of confidential court records including juvenile records and confidential attorney discipline documents due to a security glitch within the State Bar of California through their Tyler Technologies Odyssey case management system. And while the California courts seem to have caught the issue and remove the confidential and juvenile records from their site, these records had already actually been scraped by a third party called JudyRecords. So the court issued a statement saying that it appears that the previously unknown security vulnerability and the Tyler Technologies Odyssey case management portal allowed the nonpublic records to be unintentionally swept up by JudyRecords. When they attempted to access the public records using a unique access method. The State Bar is working with Tyler Technologies, the maker of the system to remediate the security vulnerability, which we believe may not be unique to the state bar’s implementation and could impact other users of the Odyssey systems. So on top of that, the website JudyRecords which scrapes state and federal court records has even issued their own statement on the issue in which they are saying that out of an abundance of caution, the search functionality of the site is disabled, while any possible case access issues are resolved. Additionally, direct access to cases of the affected case management system have also been disabled. So you know, I think that portion that I read in California statement, which said that other states may also be affected by Tyler Technologies Odyssey system. I think that’s going to be a little bit of a stressor for courts as they dig through to see if they too were experiencing any kind of data leak on this issue.
Marlene Gebauer 3:58
Yeah, greed. Lex Machina and LexisNexis recently released their latest Law Firms Activity Report, which surveys the most active law firms in the federal district court. This report focuses on the three year period from 2019-2021 and analyzes law firm activity in 16 practice areas and in cases caused by COVID-19. The final section of the report includes an analysis of the overall most active law firms in federal district court. So a couple highlights. There are metrics around major employment firms that appeared on the most active list by practice area, by most active firms involved with cases by COVID-19, and most active firms overall. And class actions and suits, excluding multi district legislation and related to a particular event, continue to be impactful in the overall landscape of litigation, and the area’s influenced our products liability, torts, and insurance practice areas.
Greg Lambert 4:56
Yeah, COVID brought us some high activity
Marlene Gebauer 5:00
Exactly. And will continue to,
Greg Lambert 5:02
Especially as you see the AmLaw 100 and 200 results come out over the next couple of months. You know you’ll see how busy.
Greg Lambert 5:10
Well, Marlene, you know what we’re missing?
Marlene Gebauer 5:13
What?
Greg Lambert 5:14
Another law school in Florida.
Marlene Gebauer 5:17
Of course we are.
Greg Lambert 5:17
Yeah. So with some of the kidding aside, you know, there actually hasn’t been a new law school open since 2014. And in the meantime, Florida Coastal and Indiana Tech law schools shuttered over the past few years. You know, the new school is going to be located in Jacksonville, Florida, and will be named the Jacksonville University College of Law. It’s a private institution, but it’s getting a chunk of change from the City of Jacksonville, which is ponying up $5 million in public funding to get Florida’s 12th law school opened. In a somewhat related bit of news, I think maybe you saw this as well. Congratulations to our friends up at the University of North Texas Law School for getting full ABA accreditation this week. So yeah,
Marlene Gebauer 6:07
Good job, guys. Congratulation! So you know what else we’ve been missing, Greg?
Greg Lambert 6:11
What else?
Marlene Gebauer 6:12
Legal explainer TikToks.
Greg Lambert 6:16
My life is now complete.
Marlene Gebauer 6:18
But now we have them thanks to Harvard Law spouses. Maclen Stanley, a 2018. Harvard grad, published a book last summer called the law says what stuff he didn’t know about law, but really should and realize he needed help to promote it. So he enlisted the help of his wife, Ashleigh Ruggles, also a 2018. Harvard Law grad. Now, Ashleigh was a little reluctant, but after realizing she wasn’t going to have to dance, got on board. The videos started as promotionals for the book, but they quickly turned into legal explainer videos regarding current legal topics, like vaccine mandates, for example. So there’s a cool side note, both Ashleigh and Maclen took a class at Harvard on design thinking, and we’re big on design thinking, right. And it’s called legal innovation through design thinking. And it’s taught by Professor of Practice and director of executive education, Scott Westfahl. And the couple say that the experience has really influenced their TikTok endeavor. Now, they’ve been invited to speak on the national news channels and at conferences around the country. So maybe we can get them on the pod.
Greg Lambert 7:23
Maybe that’s what we need next. Marlene is a The Geek in Review, TikTok.
Marlene Gebauer 7:28
There we go.
Greg Lambert 7:30
Yeah, I don’t think so. All right. Well, that wraps up this week’s information inspirations.
Greg Lambert 7:42
Today’s guest discusses her new book on legal data and how the legal industry should better leverage the information we gather ways to improve our own practices and business objectives, as well as to better serve the markets, which have been sorely ignored and underserved for years.
Marlene Gebauer 8:00
We’d like to welcome Sarah Sutherland, President and CEO at the Canadian Legal information Institute, often referred to as CanLII, and author of Legal Data and Information in Practice: How Data and the Law Interact, which was just released. Sarah, welcome to The Geek in Review.
Sarah Sutherland 8:16
Thank you, Marlene.
Marlene Gebauer 8:18
So the book is on legal data. So let’s start off with a really broad question. How do you define legal data, at least as far as you describe it in your writing?
Sarah Sutherland 8:29
I gave legal data purposefully a fairly broad definition in in this book. And so that would include any kind of documents that are produced by courts or legislatures. So the entire corpus of the primary law, all the court filings, bills, but also things like all of lawyers work products, statistical data around the court processes, or lawyers work and time sheets, all those things, I purposely wanted to include them all, because I think they’re all part of the wider context. And I think that as we move into integrating data into our work, it’s important to have this wider view of what it all could be, so that we can really understand the potential and then we can start narrowing it down into what we actually want to do at any particular moment or project. If you read this book, my goal is you will be conversant in the issues. You know, if you’re if you’re supporting others work, you’ll understand what they’re doing. And you’ll understand what’s possible so you know where to direct your efforts in order to move forward.
Greg Lambert 9:49
I know many of us, including yourself have talked about the importance of leveraging data in the legal industry for many, many years now. You know, we’ve seen it in others industries. But why is it that the legal industry seems to be so reluctant to start integrating the data into our business practices?
Sarah Sutherland 10:09
I think that there’s quite a few reasons, I think one of the reasons is a bit more esoteric, and that, you know, people who are drawn to the law tend to be wordy people.
Greg Lambert 10:20
That’s true.
Sarah Sutherland 10:21
And so, you know, we, we tend to be language focused, and not so much knowledge/ mathematics focused. And so there’s a little bit of a cultural disconnect between the people who happen to be in the system, and these applications. But I think that also, the thing about the law is that we have such long timelines. You know, if we look to the common law is going back, you know, 1000 years, it’s, we’re approaching 1000 years of the Common Law. And so we have these complexities, you know, the, our courts go back to the medieval court, where you would go and you would appear before the local lord or the king and ask to have your your case adjudicated like this is, it’s deep, and it’s messy, and it’s evolved over time. And a lot of the processes that we have developed not as a way to support legal research, or to even I think, support the process of going to court or to practice the law, but to provide a record that good governance has been done. So with the primary law in particular, it’s just, it’s a way to keep track of everything, and to look through all the stages, and that all the T’s have been crossed, and the i’s have been dotted as we’ve been governed. And it’s messy, because there’s a lot of people involved. And so we end up with these large complicated documents that are built with a whole bunch of authors, and a whole bunch of copies. And it’s just not easy.
Greg Lambert 11:55
Yeah, I think I think saying messy, kind of, encompasses the
Marlene Gebauer 11:59
precedent takes such a…
Sarah Sutherland 12:01
Yeah, and is, it’s because they reflect human cultures and human societies, and the way that we choose to live together as communities, and human beings are messy.
Greg Lambert 12:13
Well, and there was one other thing that and Marlene and I had talked about this a week or so ago, and that was, even simple things are hard to track and put data points on such as, you know, how, how many wins, has your litigation team done, you know, what was the win? So yeah, being able to define things. So I can, I can see where messy is a good term for it.
Sarah Sutherland 12:38
Another thing is that we’re dealing with language, and human language is enormously complex. And so to analyze these documents, where you have, you know, court judgments with, you know, they can be 100 pages more than 100 pages long, and you’re going to actually analyze them as a whole and compare them to others. The computing power just hasn’t been there. It’s only recently that that kind of computing power, is there in a way that would support it.
Marlene Gebauer 13:10
Yeah. And I mean, you know, precedent is so important in this industry. I mean, you have to, you know, you have to keep it all and you have to keep it going way back, because you don’t know if you know, precedent will change or you know if it is, you know, what are you going to go back to make that argument.
Sarah Sutherland 13:29
Exactly.
Marlene Gebauer 13:31
One of the issues we’ve discussed before on the podcast is that, while we may be swimming in an ocean of data within law firms, courts and other parts of the legal industry, we aren’t exactly known for having the cleanest of data to work with the oceans polluted. How do you convince the powers that be not to let this stop you from compiling and extracting, analyzing and leveraging data in our business and legal practices?
Sarah Sutherland 14:00
I think, to pull back a little bit from the question, I think that the problem of messy data is something that everybody who deals with data has. If you ever talked to someone who’s doing dealing with life science data, or anything else, I think 90% or more than 90% of their time is actually spent cleaning their data before they get started analyzing it. So that’s not a problem that’s unique to us. I think the compelling element for this is the benefits that can be had. So if we think about a law firm, there are enormous potential benefits for being able to provide better answers to people. I did an analysis a few years ago based on some business principles about you know, kind of optimizing information at various decision points and how much it would actually be worth in kind of an overly simplistic hypothetical law firm. And the numbers that I came up with were enormous. It made so much difference, to improve the quality of advice to clients, even 1% or 2%. So that could be, you know, optimizing advice at some stage, it could be integrating better processes that would require some kind of checks and balances along the way. It could be trying to find the bottom performing lawyers and targeting them for increased training. All of these things have enormous potential to increase the value of work for clients, and in return the value of the client relationships for the law firms. For governments and courts, I think that the argument is, it’s clear that our laws are not applied equitably, that there are, you know, there are differences in outcomes. And without understanding exactly what they are, it can be difficult to know how to remedy it. So a better understanding of data would allow us to better implement the systems that we would need in order to govern more justly and more efficiently.
Marlene Gebauer 16:15
So you know, in that instance, what you’re saying is sort of identify the problem using data and then work backwards to solve?
Sarah Sutherland 16:23
Yes. And potentially, over time, if there could be a practice of experimental design within the law, there could be the potential that instead of having people say, well, we’ll do this. So we’ll do that. And that will solve this or that problem. This way, we could actually have something like a randomized control trial, that would allow some kind of evidence based assessment of what different potential legal interventions would lead to.
Greg Lambert 16:53
You know, Sarah’s as I was reading through the book, I found chapters four and five. And I highly recommend them for any of the data wonks out there, because you dive in on data analysis techniques, in chapter four. And then in chapter five, you do interpreting legal data. And, you know, I think a lot of us in the industry, know that we have opportunities to leverage data, but we may not know where to even start. So what are some techniques that you’ve seen or think that we can work with the data that we have, and use that as a starting point?
Sarah Sutherland 17:33
I think that in many cases, we aren’t ready to actually use the data that we have. So I think that we will probably need to explore ways of collecting and finding data before that can move forward. And
Greg Lambert 17:49
Okay. That went a different direction.
Sarah Sutherland 17:52
Sorry. But then going forward, I think, once that is done, there could be things like standard business analysis that would, you know, allow law firms to optimize and, you know, start to integrate some business practices that would perhaps, look at making more standardized documents. Using the data to do better predictive systems that would allow firms to work better, faster, more efficiently, and perhaps with higher quality. You know, there’s a lot of products that exist already. So things like personal injury damages, or sentencing, cost awards, those kinds of data points have been used for years. And, you know, there’s commercial services that you can buy that provide those numbers. And, you know, there’s different ways to, to parse that.
Greg Lambert 18:44
Yeah, jury verdicts, I think, would be something.
Sarah Sutherland 18:47
Yes. Any of those things. And I think there are getting to be outward looking machine learning applications that allow plain language to be to be input. I think at this point, most of the things that you’re going to get off the shelf that you’re just going to import your content into are going to be more proofs of concept rather than something that you’re gonna be able to deploy. But it’s definitely worth exploring. And once you kind of see what can be done with what you have, it can start giving you a better idea of how to move forward. But I think that, in the immediate term, the most promising systems will likely be for research within academia. I think that there’s a great deal of room for academics to explore things like the structure of language, how we talk about different groups of people. How do different attributes of the judges the way they speak or write, how do they affect outcomes? These kinds of discussions are very important to explore and the this academic research will start to point the way for deployment in the legal industry and in government as it’s in process.
Marlene Gebauer 20:06
So I have a follow up question because you’re, you’re touching on what I was going to ask. So, you know, we hear a lot of buzzwords when it comes to legal data. So things like predictive coding, or machine learning, natural language processing, and you know, of course, the catch all, you know, artificial intelligence. How are you seeing these technologies working in the industry? And, you know, how much of it is real? And how much of it is just hype?
Sarah Sutherland 20:35
Well, I think, artificial intelligence in particular, it’s not really a technical term, it’s a, you know, it’s a
Greg Lambert 20:44
You wouldn’t happen to think it’s marketing term, would you?
Sarah Sutherland 20:48
It’s a marketing. In some instances, it’s synonymous with magic, the way people use it. And so, once we think of it that way, it’s not, it’s not technical. So I will pull back from that one, though, the technology, you know, the technologies that are grouped in that grab bag are, are important and useful. I think the natural language processing is, it’s come a long way. And I think it’s is going to continue to proceed, and it makes a big difference in the way things will be handled going forward. And it will allow us to do things with the primary law with documents with internal documents that were never possible before. And this can be many things. It can be next sentence prediction, it could be extracting statistical information or other numerical information from plain text documents, it could be any number of things kind of fall in that group. And I think that’s where a huge amount of progress is going to be coming forward. With machine learning, there’s kind of a couple areas of research that I would kind of group machine learning in and one of them is essentially enhanced statistical analysis of a particular data set. And another is more along the lines of the natural language processing. And so I think that, as I said, the natural language processing is going to be this huge element going forward. The statistical analysis is important. But I think in many cases, in law, we’re unlikely to ever have the kinds of large datasets of statistical information that we would need for that kind of application. So if you think of something like Amazon’s predictor of whether you’re actually going to buy something, whether they should, you know, start the process of getting ready to ship to you. That is very in depth, they have millions and millions of interactions to base that on. And in most cases, in law, we’re dealing with interactions that people have with other people, whether it’s mediated through writing or some other way. And so as long as we’re dealing with people and people, we’re always going to end up with a relatively small number. And so I don’t have a huge amount of… I don’t want to say I don’t have optimism, but I just don’t think it’s going to be as widely adopted in in law as natural language processing. I think that instead, we’re more likely to deal with more traditional statistical analysis, which would be something that you would learn if you took statistics in college or university, just because we don’t need to process datasets that large.
Marlene Gebauer 23:53
What about like neural networks and conceptual types of searching? Where do you see that going?
Sarah Sutherland 23:59
I think that’s an important development. I think it’s going to be more widely deployed. And it’s going to be more widely deployed in organizations that are smaller. It won’t require such huge amounts of investment going forward. Because, you know, these applications, many of them are open source, you can just you can download them. And if you have the computing power, you’re willing to drop several grand on, you know, Amazon server space or whatever system, you can get this running if you have the expertise. And so I think that creates a lot of opportunity for many smaller systems to be to work better. And I think that many of the organizations that are doing that work, see the opportunity to have that work, use again. So I think that that will probably be happening is that these neural networks will kind of proliferate and we’ll have more that are particular to law. And so the work better.
Greg Lambert 25:03
And one other factor neck external data. We’re seeing a lot more of the legal vendors being, or are opening up parts of their of their databases through API’s, do you think that this external data may help with either cleaning up or improving the internal data?
Sarah Sutherland 25:28
I think it’s entirely possible, it depends on what you want to do. Having large data sets of legal language will help with things like the neural nets, with all these applications, because we need training data. And so within many organizations, even a large law firm, I suspect that it’s difficult to get enough data to actually have the training data as well as the production data. And you don’t necessarily want to pull out, you know, 20, or 30% of all your internal data to not be processed in your system. And so, for your testing, and so I think that if you can train it on these external sources, if the external sources are robust and ready, it has the potential to make a lot of these internal projects more possible.
Greg Lambert 26:25
Sarah, you, you’ve been at CanLII for a number of years now, you know, and there’s this goal there of making Canadian law more accessible. What is it that governments could be doing to make information and legal data points more accessible to the public? And are there specific things that that you would fix if you had the power to fix it?
Sarah Sutherland 26:50
I didn’t know you were gonna give me a magic wand like this?
Greg Lambert 26:53
Well, you get the magic wand now, be ready, because we’re gonna ask you to pull out a crystal ball later.
Sarah Sutherland 26:58
Okay. Okay. I think I would really like to see governments put in the effort and the time to publish documents in ways that support current and potential uses. Court cases should be readily created, you know, and disseminated from the courts in ways that support things like accessibility for people who need to use screen readers or other applications like that. That these things should be done from the beginning. And they should be robust enough that as we move forward, these, you know that the documents can be used in more ways into the future. And so a good example of this, that I explored in my book was the publishing system in Singapore, where years ago, they looked at, you know, how to structure their judgments, and to have all the judgment structured in the same way, you know, the sections are tagged properly with XML tags so that you can actually kind of publish and parse and understand and use those documents as data in a much more robust way. As opposed to the situation in the United States or Canada, where it’s much more artisanal. And there’s, you know, that the judges can kind of format their documents to some degree, how they choose. And there’s a certain amount of judicial independence that I do understand. They shouldn’t necessarily be forced to do everything exactly the way that
Greg Lambert 28:37
That they’re still publishing and WordPerfect?
Sarah Sutherland 28:40
Yes, yes. And so to have those kinds of things handled, I think would make a huge difference, because it’s very difficult and expensive to retrofit data collections. I would like to see governments invest in research and development in law to move between, you know, the primary research that can go on in academia and commercialization in the same way that there is for the life sciences. So that these applications are coming through and are regularly developed and move forward in the way that they would be in another discipline. But we just don’t really have like a research lab. You know, there’s no government research in law in the same way. I would like to see governments and courts take responsibility for addressing the tensions between privacy rights and access to legal information in creative ways. So instead of making the privacy interests more exposed, and reducing access to legal information, I would like to see go the other way we can increase access and protect people’s personal needs.
Marlene Gebauer 29:51
Alright, so continuing with the magic theme. Before we go, we want you to pull out your crystal ball and peer into the future for us. What do you see happening in regards to how the legal industry will expand and better leverage data over the next five years or so?
Sarah Sutherland 30:12
I think that my forecast is that we will have an increased market size for the legal industry as a whole, because there’s a very large unserviced market for legal problems that there’s a lot of people who perhaps can’t afford to have, you know, a fully lawyer mediated experience with a lawyer, but who has some money to help solve their problems. And I think the way that we can accomplish that partly is through increased productivity. So I think the data will allow work to be faster and more exact. And this will allow services to be cheaper. So I don’t think there will still be big corporations and individuals with big complex legal problems. I don’t think that’s in doubt. But there’s a lot of people who have problems that are very complicated for them personally, that aren’t necessarily all that complicated legally. And I think there’s a lot of room there to bred out legal services to help them. And it’s not going to be as profitable, but if the productivity grows enough, it might be an opportunity to build some really robust businesses in there. I hope that there will continue to be more research and investment into born digital legal data. So I would like to see systems that for example, you know, remove unnecessary ambiguity from the law, so that we don’t have to help make a fuss about something that, you know, is ambiguous for no purpose. But then to also say, in legislation, for example, there’s often a legitimate reason why you would have ambiguity where you could say, we’re not going to lay out every possible outcome in this law before we pass it. So this is where it’s appropriate to have human judgment step in and it could go to court or however you want to deal with it. And then we just come back to publishing the laws in more structured ways, from a computing standpoint. For artificial intelligence and machine learning, I think there’s many applications that exist right now. So, you know, people are trying to predict court outcomes and, you know, do writing assist technologies, and all these things. And I think those will all continue. But I don’t really see a future where, you know, human judgment, and, you know, all these decisions are going to be made based on AI recommendations, because most things that go to court, go to court because they’re complicated, and novel. And machine learning applications don’t deal very well with things that are novel and complicated. And so, you know, simple things, I think can be increasingly dealt with through machine learning. But hopefully, that will save the time of people who worked in the legal system to devote their efforts to solving bigger problems.
Greg Lambert 33:25
That sounds good. And I think people are happy to learn that there will be no robot lawyers in the next five years. Well, Sarah Sutherland, CEO and President at CanLII, as well as the author of the brand new book, Legal Data and Information in Practice: How Data and the Law Interact. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us.
Marlene Gebauer 33:50
Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Sutherland 33:51
Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Marlene, I was very happy to join you today.
Marlene Gebauer 33:58
So, Greg, you know, love to talk about data and you know, data, like we’re definitely data wonks. We are her audience.
Greg Lambert 34:08
Yeah, it was a shame. You know, we tried to get her on a few weeks ago, right, as the book was being released, but, man, it’s just been crazy. So I’m glad she was able to hang on and come, make sure she got on the show.
Marlene Gebauer 34:22
Yeah. And so I agree 100% What she’s saying in terms of the neural networks and conceptual searching and sort of having these opportunities in these small organizations. And I even think there’s opportunity and for some larger applications, particularly in the States. I mean, we see some of the large players already in e-discovery, I mean, conceptual searching is has been around for a while, and we see things like CaseTexts, with their new enhanced capacities. So I do think that particularly here in the States and also in Europe, you’re going to see a lot of that type of development.
Greg Lambert 34:55
Yeah. And I think what you know, one of the things she was focused in on was, it’s affordable for the smaller ones where before it wouldn’t necessarily have been affordable. And I think that’s one of the hidden benefits that we’re seeing with the amount of processing power that’s out there. And things like, as much as we complain about Amazon for other things when it comes to their cloud storage, I think those types of opportunities for smaller organizations, and firms, and governments really opens up the ability to play with the data that you have.
Greg Lambert 35:30
Well, thanks again to Sarah Sutherland, from CanLII, and the author of Legal Data and Information and Practice: How Data and the Law Interact, for taking the time to talk with us. Thanks, Sarah.
Marlene Gebauer 35:41
Yeah, everybody, go out and buy the book. And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter.
Greg Lambert 35:56
and I can be reached at @glambert on Twitter.
Marlene Gebauer 35:59
Or you can leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7270 and as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.
Greg Lambert 36:11
Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, I’m gonna go crunch some data.
Marlene Gebauer 36:14
crunch crunch crunch
Greg Lambert 36:16
Talk to you later
Marlene Gebauer 36:21
Bye