In this episode, Marlene Gebauer interviews attendees at two recent legal tech conferences – the TLTF Summit and the Legal AI Pathfinder’s Assembly. She asks them about the biggest impacts they foresee AI and other innovations having on the legal industry in 2024. Their responses range from predictions that AI will help automate legal workflows and build tools faster, to allowing for better data analytics and metrics to improve client relationships and retention.

Marlene and Greg comment on the various perspectives shared. Key themes that emerge include leveraging AI to improve efficiency and processes, being cautious not to move too quickly, opportunities to reduce legal costs and enhance Access to Justice and hopes that 2024 will see AI tools become more practical and move beyond “party tricks”. While recognizing the excitement around AI, they emphasize focusing on real business problems to solve rather than just implementing solutions for their own sake.

List of Speakers:

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Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer 0:08
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal profession. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert 0:14
And I’m Greg Lambert.

Marlene Gebauer 0:17
So Happy New Year, Greg. Happy New Year here.

We’re only a couple of weeks in so

I know we retired 2023 We’re jumping into 2024. So did you have a nice holiday?

Greg Lambert 0:27
I did. So I got to spend my 30th wedding anniversary in Germany, we took one of those Viking river cruises. Very enjoyable. little pricey for me, you know, me, I’m the cheap geek.

Marlene Gebauer 0:44
I do.

Greg Lambert 0:45
Not that much money. But we had we had a blast and really couldn’t, couldn’t have asked for a better way to have spent our 30 as the the crew on the ship took really good care of us. And we met some super nice people on on the cruise.

Marlene Gebauer 1:02
That’s terrific. I understood you went to the markets, so you got to go see those.

Greg Lambert 1:07
Yeah, the markets were all open in Germany. And so we get to walk around, look at a lot of little Christmas ornaments. And little made of wood star. Lots of stuff made wood. And then we drink. Not a lot, but a sufficient amount of gluwine, which was described to me as you take wine, you heat it up, and then you put glue in it. So that’s glue. I’m just repeating what I was told.

Marlene Gebauer 1:45
I was gonna say that’s a great appetizing description of it for sure. For sure, well, it was great. I didn’t. I didn’t get to go overseas. But I did get to go back to New Jersey and New York, which was tons of fun, got to see my parents and you know, the kids got to see, you know, all their friends up there. And I had a wonderful spa day with some of my friends. And then I also got to go out to concert with some friends. I got to go to Central Park and met up with some folks and we literally walked from, from like Penn Station, all all the way up to Central Park and just walked all over Central Park. I hit a lot of places that I’ve never actually been to there. So I was you know, this many years old when I got to the Alice in Wonderland statues. So there you go. So anyway, it was it was quite nice, and really had a had a good time. Good. Good. Well, did you have any resolutions?

Greg Lambert 2:48
Well, we’re already halfway through January. So you should ask, Do I have any that I’ve kept? I am actually doing a dry January. Mostly because I did a like a super soaked December. So I need to dry out. But as is our friend Toby Brown told me recently he’s like, Well, I’m doing dry January up to January 30. But then going to legal week, and then we’re going to be having some events at legal week and really can’t pass up the booze illegal week, right?

Marlene Gebauer 3:29
Yeah, yeah. That’s true. True. Free. So you know, do it right. Yeah, no, no. Yeah, more resolutions just sort of to be in the present. And that’s sort of mine. So that’s kind of going to be an ongoing thing. Does that work on that?

Greg Lambert 3:46
So are you in the present? Now?

Marlene Gebauer 3:48
You know me? So it’s like, yeah, struggling, but working on it. I’m working on it. So I know we’re, we’re kind of into January, we took some time off. So just sort of catching up on things. But last month, went to Miami, I attended the TLTF Summit. That’s a very highly curated gathering for entrepreneurs, for investors, companies and practitioners who are creating, powering and partnering with technology companies and transforming the world of law.

Greg Lambert 4:25
You want to know how curated it was?

Marlene Gebauer 4:29
How curated, was it?

Greg Lambert 4:30
I was not invited. That’s how I curated. Next year, next year.

Marlene Gebauer 4:36
next year, next year. Well actually, it was it was really a great I mean, I’d never been to you know, a conference like this one where you just had this kind of group of people together. And I really liked that I liked how they structured things you know, you had I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say I mean they had like quick presentations and then the You know, groups, you know, the people, and it was in different categories. And then, you know, so you know, litigation, for example. And then people who were in the room would sort of vote on, like, who they thought was the best. And like, overall, like, who got the most points would end up in the final presentation at the end of the summit? And, you know, you got to see all of those those presenters, and you could, you know, connect with those folks. Like, if there was something where you thought, wow, that would be of interest to, you know, my firm, then, you know, you could do that. And I mean, I know that firms brought clients, you know, a lot of high level people from firms were there that I, you know, I saw, so, I thought it was fantastic. And, you know, I’ve come back with like, Okay, I have a bunch of connections, not only to talk with on the podcast, which we will be doing, in fact, some of the people will say it in a minute. So this is what this this, this podcast is dedicated to as the interviews that I had there, but we’ll go deeper with a few of them in the future. But you know, also, you know, opportunities to connect with these vendors, you know, just for purposes of checking them out for the firm. So, it was cool. Yeah. But you gave me You gave me your microphones, you gave me your little microphones, by the way I bought exactly the same one. So now, I have to give you years back, but and I wrote mg on Mines, so don’t get messed up.

That way I don’t get confused.

That’s right. That’s right, because it’s so easy to get confused. But these microphones were were a lifesaver. I got a lot of short interviews from many of the attendees at the summit, to ask them about what they view as some of the biggest impacts that technology may have on the legal industry in the near future. And that was, you know, again, it was just a real opportunity to sort of connect a little bit more and people, a lot of people there didn’t know about the podcast. And so it was also an opportunity to tell them a little bit about what we’re doing. Get subscribed. So yeah,

Greg Lambert 7:04
how the hell do they know that podcasts? We’re awesome.

Marlene Gebauer 7:08
It’s like some of these folks are brand new, they’re kind of new to the legal space, you know, that they, you know, so you know, this is? This is a good thing, Greg, this is a good thing.

Greg Lambert 7:17
All right. All right. All right. So well, you did a great job, grabbing the people at Summit and pulling them to the side. But I have to say, as the audio engineer of this podcast, I didn’t really think through how well the recordings were gonna sound when you’re in a packed room with people and everyone else is talking at the same time. So I did a bit of cleanup on them, as best I could, some of the voices in order to kind of remove enough of the background to hear them may sound a little off to the listeners. And they’ll probably sound really off to the person that’s actually talking. But that’s, that’s me, that’s not the person, the person actually doesn’t really sound like they may be underwater when they’re talking. But I think they’re understandable enough for this. And I put together a transcript for the episode, which will be on the three geeks site. And so you know, feel free if you don’t quite get something. Look at the three geeks and a law blog page for the episode. And you can catch that part of the answer. We have 17 attendees who were gracious enough to talk to us or talk to you.

Marlene Gebauer 8:39
I should note that some of the some of the interviews were actually from the practice of practical AI.

Greg Lambert 8:48
Oh, yeah. Yeah, there were a few of those. The Yeah, let

Marlene Gebauer 8:54
me do that. Again. Like, I should note that that some of the interviews, a few of the interviews are from the practical AI conference that both of us also attended in December. And so was able to get to to speak with some people there. That was also a great conference. I just thought very well curated, the topics were spot on. And like really not a whole lot of overlap. And you know, everybody really knew their stuff. So

Greg Lambert 9:21
yeah, yeah. And I was invited to that one. So yeah, so so well. So the idea behind this episode is we’re going to go through and listen to the guests that are to the interviews. Some of these range from just you know, 30 seconds or less and some, but I don’t think we have any that are over like a couple of min. Yeah, there’s no long season short answers, and we can ask them to project as a variation of our crystal ball question but really kind of project to see what they Think 2024 is going to bring to the to the legal industry. So, Marlene, anything else you want to do before we queue up? Paul Giedraitis.

Marlene Gebauer 10:16
I think we should learn how to pronounce his name first. We’re doing the best we can. We’re just doing the best we can, folks. So yes, I think we’re all set to go.

Greg Lambert 10:27
All right. Well, I like said First up is Paul. Okay.

Paul Giedraitis 10:32
I’m Paul Giedraitis founder and CEO of Orgami. Well, I think with the explosion of Gen AI technology and LLM base models, what we’re going to see over the next year is that delivery of legal work is going to become increasingly automated, and eventually, somewhat commoditized. And so I think what we’re gonna see a firm doubling down on focusing on business of why applications and AI, in addition to just practical applications, so we’re gonna be using data analytics to improve the health of a client relationship, improved growth strategy than improved client retention.

Greg Lambert 11:02
All right. Well, that was Paul, Paul’s with Orgami. I mean, I think that’s the that’s

I don’t disagree. That’s a pretty safe bet. Yeah. No, I agree. I did want to dive in on one of the things that he that he talked about net was, they’re going to double down on focusing on business of law applications. And I think what we’re hearing there is, is more of the back office, stuff that we’re seeing not necessarily billable hour work, but rather the things that support the billable hour work, which makes total sense. In fact, when, if people ask me, you know, what, what, how is it that a firm should start with AI? The first thing I tell them is what not to do. And I was like, Don’t go after the billable hour, right off the bat, you know, look at the things that are in the back office marketing, library, Finance, any of that recruiting any of those business development, that’s probably where you’re going to get the biggest appetite and get people to want to do more.

Marlene Gebauer 12:17
Yeah, I mean, already seeing, you know, AI, sort of helping with, like the writing of, you know, various business development documents, and, you know, we’re already seeing it in the research space. One kind of practical thing I’ll note is, when he’s talking about data analytics, and you know, just thinking, you know, analytics in general. I think there’s still some work to be done there. I mean, I, you know, they, you know, some of these, these Gen AI models still don’t do well with tables. And they don’t always do well with numbers. So that I think is going to be a bit of a hurdle. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens this year with that. Yeah.

Greg Lambert 13:05
I’m sure we’ll, we’ll talk more about that, that it’s, it’s not just the generative AI, that’s, that’s going to be going so. Do you want to talk about our next speaker next?

Marlene Gebauer 13:19
Yeah, Andrew Madeiros who’s the Director of Innovation at Troutman pepper. And Andrew, Andrew has a slightly different take on on sort of whether we should all be rushing into Gen AI.

Andrew Medeiros 13:41
Yeah, Andrew, here. I am the Director of Innovation or Troutman Pepper. I really do preparing to take our current, we need a walk before we run. In our weird AD at a conference like this, talking about everything that we’ve done already. Well, we tried to be caught here, the cost that we can kind of take our time, or walking is not thing still. But we have to really evaluate the market. Be thoughtful about the solution that you’re on board, and the solutions that we offer to our attorneys.

Greg Lambert 14:17
Thoughts on that one?

Marlene Gebauer 14:22
Yes. I have thoughts. I have many thoughts. I think he’s right. I think you do have to be cautious. I think firms need to be cautious. I mean, clearly we have a lot of ethical responsibilities to our clients and their data. And so you know, we shouldn’t be running kind of headlong into some of this new technology without, you know, doing our due diligence. That said,

Greg Lambert 15:00
I knew there was a but coming in.. ,

Marlene Gebauer 15:03
But, you know, but and you know, obviously, you know, every every organization is different, like you have to be comfortable. So you have to do this when you know from from a, you know, a firm organization perspective, you’re comfortable. But, you know, that said, and I know, we’ve talked about this before, and you know, this is happening. And so you really do have to kind of have your toe in the water, at least, to you know, just to sort of stay, you know, to stay afloat in terms of how fast this stuff is moving like, you know, you you want to be involved, you want to be trying this stuff out, you want to be thinking of opportunities. Because, you know, you you can’t just sort of wait until I don’t think in this situation, you can wait until everything is safe and done. Because that’s already too late.

Greg Lambert 16:00
Yeah, I think I think you’re right. And I think he was, you know, he kind of put a disclaimer in there in that walking is not standing still. So it’s not that we’re doing nothing. But at the same time, I think he is right. We need to make sure that we have problems to solve, and not just solutions looking for those problems, which I think a lot of people are already jumping the gun on that. So I think that approach is probably perfect. But I Be careful walking when everyone else is jogging and running, and not get too far behind on it, which which I think he I think that’s what he means is that it’s keeping pace with everyone else, but not necessarily jumping in and making foolish decisions just because you want to do something in order to be doing something.

Marlene Gebauer 16:58
Right. So position the position two on the peloton bike?

Greg Lambert 17:02
What’s a position two position? Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Man, speaking of which, I need to get back on mine. So All right, next up is a Justin helms from Husch Blackwell.

Justin Helms 17:18
Justin Helms, Husch Blackwell, artificial intelligence, solution stress, I would say leveraging AI in automated workflows. So taking apart document, putting them into the specific attribute, quality checking up, and then building whatever generative information from there automatically, that’s going to be a huge win for everybody. Yeah,

Greg Lambert 17:40
and on this, I think this touches a little bit of what we heard earlier from Paul, which was talking about, there’s, I think there’s layering of AI that we’re going to see in 2024, that we didn’t necessarily see in 2023. And that is, we’re going to have databases, we’re going to have structured and unstructured information, we’re going to have machine learning, we’re going to have natural language processing, data extraction, and then generative AI, I think that’s the the I think a lot of people right now, especially those that may not be as savvy on the generative AI and the rest of the AI front thinks that, you know, ChatGPT is the is the do all to end all, and what we’re going to see is this layering, and putting things in the appropriate layer to organize the data, retrieve the data, and then be able to generate the content that we’re looking for.

Marlene Gebauer 18:53
I think we were talking earlier, before we started recording that, you know, there’s there’s some solutions that are going to have to be sort of highly specific and structured. And then there’s going to be you know, other situations where, you know, it doesn’t have to be it could be more creative. And so, you know, you are going to see different opportunities, and it’s going to be great, I think for innovation professionals for km professionals, you know, for any professionals that are kind of touching this space, because it it sort of revives interest and some of the tools that we already have, right, that may not have Gen AI ai components, but we’re going to be you know, very, very useful to people but this this whole sort of, you know, interest in Gen AI ai, you can sort of direct people to in the right direction. And you know, the other thing is sort of connecting Gen AI ai with sort of existing processes and you know, you’re already starting to see that a little bit like, you know, the automation for example. You know, sort of writing code to You get certain sort of documentation in there and then have an automated prompt to do something and then getting a result.

Greg Lambert 20:07
Yep. Yep. All right. Well, next up, get everyone strap in, because we’re gonna get a little geeky, I think. So. Okay.

Marlene Gebauer 20:17
Melina Higgins is up next.

Milena Higgins 20:21
Hi, I’m Milena Higgins. Chief Technology Officer for Cloud Court. We are legal tech start up in the testimony,essentially litigation Something that’s been in my mind that I bet we will talk about a lot which I think will emerge next year is things around synthetic data in legal.. And we will, because we so far been using the available data, but there’s so much more that we can be doing. Like the data is not ours. It’s client data. Clients don’t want to use that data. We need synthetic data, which other industry are doing.

Marlene Gebauer 20:56
Tell me a little more about synthetic data.

Milena Higgins 21:00
Yeah, that concept is. So an industry like banking, for example, you don’t want to run people’s real social security numbers or credit card or, their name. So to train those models, he basically fake the data the same way you may wonder exactly, exactly. Exactly. So we will need to as an industry think about coming up with the equivalent of that for our industry. Like for example, my company deal with definitely, there are very few publicly trained model. So on the flooring, all the different ways I could create synthetic data.

Greg Lambert 21:42
Yeah, that one was a little harder to hear. But basically, she was saying synthetic data in order to train the models because clients in there may be sensitive data that we don’t want to be using to train either the Large Language Models or even deep learning things like that. So interesting. So what’s your thoughts on using synthetic data?

Marlene Gebauer 22:10
Oh, she’s spot on. And, and, you know, we had a good conversation about this. And, you know, it kind of gets me wondering, it’s like, you know, can we use Gen AI to kind of create, create synthetic examples, because I mean, this, this comes up, often where, you know, say there is a tool that you want to try out, or you you know, you want to you want to do a trial of this thing. Where, you know, what, what types of data are you going to use? I mean, you can use dummy data, you can use anonymized data, but again, you know, you have to figure whatever your firm allows on that. And I know, you know, that’s, that’s a big question as to what to be able to use and what’s okay. And we also run into the problem, Greg, you totally know this is that, when your attorneys are testing things out, it’s got to be, they always want it to be their data, like, because if it’s different than what they use, like, they’re just like, well, that’s, you know, that’s, that’s not what I use, that’s not, you know, I can’t make a decision based on that. So, if we can have synthetic data that is as close as possible, but yet not you know, the actual data that’s used in the firm like that, to me would is just a lifesaver, because it would just allow us to look at things, you know, much more quickly and test things much more quickly.

Greg Lambert 23:39
It’d be interesting. In everyone, forgive me, because this is just coming right off the top of my head. But imagine that you would be able to take your financial data, your client information, maybe even the emails that come in from from your clients, and be able to essentially strip all the proper nouns out of that to remove a lot of the key information that would track that data back to the client. And then you would have an, you know, an encoder decoder type thing with your system. So that the, the models are trained on synthetic data, but you could pass it through a decoder, and the information that you’re getting back is actually real data that you have. Maybe that’s too far fetched. But, you know, I don’t know if anyone wants to go into business with that. You know, give me give me a call. Alright, so the next one we had was actually I couldn’t do anything with it in and so I apologize, but we could not get into

FX LeDuc?

Yeah, FX LeDuc. Yeah. Sorry about apologize.

Marlene Gebauer 25:01
I will reach out sorry

Greg Lambert 25:03
We’ll try again another time, but next up is Adam Stofsky. So let’s hear what Adam had to say. stopped ski. Stop ski. Adam stop ski stop ski. Well, he’ll tell us here in a second.

Marlene Gebauer 25:19
He’ll tell us who he is.

Adam Stofsky 25:21
Adam Stofsky. I’m the founder and CEO of Briefly. We’re a legal and legal information startup. Yeah. So briefly, the mission is to make legal information more accessible to everyone, I think of what we’re doing is solving the global problem of the fact that lawyers are not trained communication, like at all. You know, I think they’re all so I don’t think I had a second of training, but my great communicator by the word, zero. And I feel like the fact that out of the larger pocket judges and other lawyer, that is a huge problem, that’s a huge problem for the community are for businesses that don’t remember much about law and lawyers don’t know how to communicate about it. So that’s ton of hidden value being lost because of that. So we’re kind of on that five becoming the world’s best legal contract. Now, you could question My suspicion is, I haven’t practice law in something like 12 years or something like that. So maybe I’m not the very best person to know the answer to that. But my suspicion is, from talking to legal tech companies, lawyer in all sectors, Legal Aid in house, to firms, I think things are going to change a lot less than people think they’re going to change in 2024. The billable hour, it’s still going to be with a big firms, it’s still going to be really expensive, and our teams are going to be growing, I think we’ll see some changes at the margin. But I think the basic types of law, I don’t think this is going to be the year for dramatic dramatic change. But it’s going to come over time. That’s my prediction. At our company Briefly, we’re kind of leaning heavily into human, right, and we’re using AI for certain things. But you know, our bad is that at the end of the day, people want to hear great boys telling they want to hear from terrified people with funny things like hearing aid, weigh me through, hopefully forever enough.

Greg Lambert 27:16
There’s like you still room for people, even with with AI.

Marlene Gebauer 27:20
Still room for people relationships are important. The communication part was interesting. You know, I feel I feel like well, we probably should be training people and communication earlier. Earlier than then law school. We should be doing that in public schools. Probably a little bit better. But, you know, that’s a whole other problem, too, to unwrap. You know, while he was talking about this, I was thinking about, I was thinking about actually Josh Kubecki, who just recently did a totally generated AI, video of himself. And I thought, huh, well, that’s interesting compared to what we’re talking about here. It’s like, maybe you use Gen AI ai to become a better communicator, if you’re really bad.

Greg Lambert 28:05
Yeah, yeah. If you’re, if you’re huge introvert, you can create this artificial intelligence of video version of yourself, to communicate with your clients. I want to attack the communication from another angle, which I think 2024 is actually going to help people with and, you know, part of the communication problem is, there’s just so much going on there, you get, I mean, I literally get hundreds of emails every day. And being able to cut through that. Know about you know, when your meetings are when you’re, you know, when you should have time to yourself when you should pick up the phone and and call your client. But I think as you see the Copilot integration with with Microsoft, office 365, I think there’s going to be some of that to help you manage your time better, and to give you the prompts for the human to know when it’s time to put the emails down and pick up the phone. And so I’m hoping maybe the the artificial intelligence and that copilot types of functionality where we’re using AI as basically an assistant will help improve the human part of us So maybe that’s what we see in 2024.

Marlene Gebauer 29:35
And I’ll take it from a different angle, like relationships and communication are clearly going to be critical, particularly since all of this is so new, and people don’t really kind of know what to expect. They don’t actually know how to use it because it is so broad. I mean, I’ve gotten questions about like, look, I want to get involved but I don’t I don’t know if what I want to do works in here. I’m not really sure sure how to do it. So I think, you know, developing those sorts of relationships of trust, you know, being clear in your communication in terms of, you know what to do, what not to do, what works, what doesn’t work and sort of guiding people, I think is going to be huge. And the other point I want to raise is that, yes, the billable hour isn’t going to go away next year. And yes, you know, things are going to still be expensive. I think I read the other day that what was the was like, I don’t know if it was the average or, but it was the quote was, like, $2,400 an hour for for billing. And I’m like, Wow, that’s incredible. Yeah.

Greg Lambert 30:46
Remember when we were reluctant to go above $1,000 an hour?

Marlene Gebauer 30:53
So yeah, you’re you’re gonna you’re gonna see that happening. i He’s, he’s absolutely right on that. So. Alright, are we got up next,

Greg Lambert 31:01
we got Stephanie Curcio, who’s up next, going to go on to talk about some IP, and AI.

Stephanie Curcio 31:12
My name is Stephanie Cucio. I am the CEO and co founder of NL Patent. NL Patent is a AI based Patent search and analytics platform. So we have completely changed the way that people interact with patent data. Historically, you would search through patent data using keywords. Sounds easy, until you actually read a patent. Which are very complicated, they make no sense, you would never describe a simple thing using the word you would normally describe that thing. Instead, you would create many words and sometimes make up words, which makes them very difficult to search. So our AI system allows you just to describe that thing in plain English. And our system will automatically search hundreds of millions of atoms and generate a list of high documents that are actually similar to that thing. We hold our instance, iterative so the system will learn from you as you interact with the data. And it is often seen to outperform human experts on the course. And accuracy. Think 2024 is going to be the year of IP. So we’ve seen a lot of developments in contract, review, on track, generate and document review, all of these things have been tackled. Over the course of the last 10 years, it is a little bit high. So the technology that we’re using is pretty new. What we are doing was only possible on the last couple of years. And just five McCain’s and the technology has created a lot of new workloads that were never previously possible. So the IP system is going to be a lot more acceptable. IP attorneys are going to be way more if it’s another box, but the IP process will also be democratized in a lot of ways. So people that were never able to access that data can now do so quite easily using the technology that’s being developed is brand spanking. new.

Greg Lambert 33:03
Brand spankin new technology. I like that

Marlene Gebauer 33:06
Brand spanking new. So Stephanie, actually was one of the finalists at the the TLTF and you know, I hope that we can get her on the podcast to do a little bit more in depth discussion about the tool and what she’s she’s doing. Because if you can describe something in plain English on a patent search, that’s amazing.

Greg Lambert 33:36
Yeah, that’s a big deal. And I think that’s one of the things and I think this is why people were so excited in the legal industry, because this is a, you know, a industry that’s based on language that words matter. And the way people say and write things, you know, that could be very unique. And so if you can find a way to normalize human language, just like we do databases, it’s really going to open up a lot of opportunities for vendors. It’s like she said, it’s going to democratize the law itself, because no longer is the whatever uses you created is behind this kind of Crystal Palace of words that you’ve created to keep people out. They’re going to be able to understand even the most complicated legalese and be able to get that back in plain English and that truly is a game changer.

Marlene Gebauer 34:44
Yeah. And it’s going to be not just experts that are able to sort of do this type of of research. You know, it’s it’s going to be any, you know, I won’t say anybody, but it’s, you know, it’s going to be people who can just Just say something in plain English and find the answer.

Greg Lambert 35:05
Well, next up, did you record Dan at the AI conference? Or at glTF? Do you remember?

Marlene Gebauer 35:12
Yeah, I’m trying to remember. I think I think I think it was the New York conf, I think,

Greg Lambert 35:21
Okay, well, here

Dan Katz 35:25
I am Dan Katz. Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College Law and and also co founder of 273 Ventures. Well, I think what we’ve seen here, the first wave of Large Language Models like GPT-4, and what have you been sort of brought in through a workstreams, that were working with various different areas, but we really haven’t seen and we’re going to do more of a real engineering gulp on top of these things, a lot of what’s been done, it’s got a relatively thin layer on top of the base capability. Pretty great thoughts on the mountain bike network, while I’m looking forward to it to see you all there.

Marlene Gebauer 36:02
It was in Florida. It was it was Florida. I know, I’m thinking back. And it’s like, yeah, it was at TLTF.

Greg Lambert 36:08
So because Dan, and you and I were on a panel at the AI conference. And so we got a little bit more insight on on what Dan was talking about here. And I think he’s looking at these kinds of multi level. LLM over time, to where you’re not just relying upon one single source, but rather a large layer of sources to do that, because one of the things he said at the conference in New York, was, there’s only one internet. And once you copy the internet, you know, where do you go from there? We heard earlier, maybe it’s synthetic data. I don’t know that, that that’s what Dan was thinking. But maybe it is. But the improvements are going to come over the next 12 months. And, and so I think a lot of things that you see his limitations now are going to be there’s going to be breakthroughs, as Dan sees them in this year.

Marlene Gebauer 37:18
Yeah, I mean, he was sort of giving the timeline of sort of how stuff started and sort of where we’re at and where we’re moving. And like you said, we were, he was talking about how, you know, we started with sort of these Large Language Models, but now we’re sort of moving more into these smaller models that are sort of very specific and handle very specific type of, you know, have a very specific type of output very specific type of task. And then kind of having an overlay where, you know, you can, you know, ask your question, and, you know, ask your prompt and then be directed to whatever is appropriate to add to ask that and, or to answer that rather. And I think you’re actually seeing that in some of the vendors that, that we’ve actually talked to, recently on the podcast as well, that that there’s they’re starting to experiment with that.

Greg Lambert 38:12
Yeah. Dan’s got his fingers on the pulse, I think and so keep looking at what he’s doing and what they’re doing it 273 Ventures. So next up is Farrah Pepper from Marsh McLennan.

Farrah Pepper 38:29
Hi, this is Farrah Pepper, Chief Legal Innovation Counsel at Marsh McLennan. My role within the Marsh McLennan legal department is focused on legal innovation and technology. So we take a fresh look at how our legal team work and find ways to turbocharge it might be tests, might be process. And we’d love to make people’s day better. So an essential part of our platform is finding the joy for our colleagues and what they’re doing. Well, we’d be remiss, talking about 2024. And not talking about GEN AI, it is the hot topic right now. And you can expect a lot more dialogue within legal team about what the good and appropriate uses of Gen AI, are in our existing workflows. But I’d like to go back to basics. I think that Gen AI ai and all the hype around it, lunch of wiki real has reopened people’s hearts and minds to all different kinds of technology. So we’re kind of doing some back to basics, looking at point solutions and problems that meet that and finding that colleagues are just so receptive right now to the idea of taking in tech and injecting it into our workflows. You know, today at TLTF, We talked about litigation, but it’s really across all the different practice areas that we’re finding this renewed enthusiasm in 2024 looking at.

Greg Lambert 39:50
I don’t know if Farrah has a podcast but she’s got a great voice for podcasting. So even before Cleaning up the recording

Marlene Gebauer 39:59
Basically, it’s like, if it’s like if I could present like Farrah, you know, my life would probably be pretty complete. So shout out to her. Also shout out to her. This is a little aside. Dan was doing his his keynote, and was talking about some of the problems with not citing sources, because at the time, we had yet another attorney who, you know, was trying to put something out and didn’t check the sources, and it was vague. And

Greg Lambert 40:30
Was his last name Schwartz again?

Marlene Gebauer 40:33
Maybe, so, I think so. So, you know, Dan was, like, I feel a little bit bad for the guy and like, after the presentation for hours, like, we shouldn’t feel bad for that guy. I’m thinking myself, I was thinking the same thing. I was like, I don’t feel bad for that guy. It’s like, he knows what he needs to do. So I thought that was great. I think, you know, Farrah has her finger on the pulse that, you know, colleagues are really receptive right now. And so let’s take advantage of that. And, you know, and just but but, you know, keep it real, you know, keep it honest. You know, make sure kind of going back to being clear communicators and, and having good relationships about, you know, making sure that people understand for sure what it can and can’t do. I also love that she was hers. Her program, or her panel, rather, was on litigation. Because I’m finding, I personally am finding that more challenging to get people excited about so I am hoping and you know, as a former litigator, I’m like, I really, you know, I really want to get my peeps on board. So, you know, hoping that there’s, there’s more in 2024 there.

Greg Lambert 41:49
Yeah. And that’s been one of the things I think we’ve said a lot on on the show is, it’s good, because you’ve got this excitement. And you take advantage of that, and redirect them toward the proper way to solve their problems, even if that isn’t, what they’re envisioning how their problems should be solved with. ChatGPT. So next up is Brad Blickstein. I think this one I cleaned it up as best I can, but you may want to read along on the transcript

Brad Blickstein 42:26
Brad Blickstein, Partner and head of New Law Projects at Baretz and Brunelle. There’s a lot of talk about Large Language Models. Other GPT like functions of Generative AI. I have a VA legal up waiting legal walk in. but there’s a ton of potential value there around the building of technology. And will they project they will be working 80% faster out because they can use a generative AI built tool. I think we’re gonna see a faster building of tools in legal tech. Take it in law firms, and they will test. And they’ll figure out how to use Darren AI to build a very cool, VA. So first, look, if you’re using Generative AI is to do legal work. That delivering hour does not work. What are you going do? Take an hour worth of work and do it in two minutes and bill for two minutes? That doesn’t make sense. What I am hoping is that law firms will see that they are leaving money on the table by not building tech solutions and rolling them out via a model other than of the billable hour. And rather than having the client saying that they want flat fees, which we’ve seen over the past few years, doesn’t really work. Hopefully what we’ll see is law firms saying that we can make more money by going to something other than the hourly model for billing for work.

Greg Lambert 43:51
Yeah, so sorry about the cleanup on that one Brad.

Marlene Gebauer 43:56
Summarize that one. Yeah. So.

Greg Lambert 43:58
So I think just to summarize that, he’s thinking that he’s seeing reports where people are working 80% faster using the combination of human input and generative AI, and there’s a good Boston oh, what’s the last Boston something group? Consulting at Boston Consulting Group where it talked about it, they gave people a task. And when it was a creative task, like what’s, what’s a great new tool to go to go to market with? They worked something like 44% Faster, coming up with those ideas. But when you ask them to answer a business question, they actually fell 23% Below those that weren’t using the generative AI tool. So yes, the The Gen AI tools when used right can speed up things so and then Brad was saying, well, first speeding up the billable work. And you can do something in two minutes that used to take, you know, an hour, it doesn’t make sense to continue with the business model that we’re doing. And that law firms see that they’re leaving things on the leaving money on the table. And that they’ll they’ll be kind of pushed into a different business model, other than just straight billable hour work. So that hopefully recapped what Brad was saying. Thoughts on that?

Marlene Gebauer 45:34
Yeay, you did a very, you did a very good job recapping that. And, and, you know, I am definitely in Brad’s camp, I would love to see, you know, a new model other than the billable hour that that really takes hold, because that just I mean, first of all, it’s, it’s, you know, efficiency is the right thing to do. And secondly, I mean, I really think it gives a whole lot of opportunity for, you know, those of us on the business side of the house in law firms to really get people engaged with some of these tools. Because there’s, there’s an incentive, there’s, there’s an incentive to use them then as opposed to an incentive against them.

Greg Lambert 46:19
Yeah, yep. So I think that’s right. I think the you know, the, the, this is going to disrupt the industry. So we’ll see how we, how we adjusted to that. So next up is Brian Scherer, oh, you got something else?

Marlene Gebauer 46:38
I was gonna say next up, you’ve been saying next few times. Oh,

Greg Lambert 46:41
sorry. I’ll let you do it. This time. It’s

Marlene Gebauer 46:43
It’sokay. Okay, next up is Brian Scherer from Hey Counsel.

Brian Scherer 46:52
Brian Scherer. I am the founder of a company called Hey Counsel, and I am from San Diego, California. Yeah, so the product in it current manifestation matches startups with lawyers, and we were more independent, or small firm lawyers. And so they’re able to offer more affordable rates and more of a hands on experience. And in the future, the very near future, we’re building out a full type of support structure for lawyers who are practicing independently. So that includes community, which we already have set up. But in addition to that, it has the support services, like helping them with backend admin, bookkeeping, setting up the technology, all that stuff. And then some content events, all the things that lawyer normally experienced on the inside a law firm, but now as a practicing attorney, they don’t have. So we’re working on. I mean, I feel like you like say, AI. I don’t want to a lifer. Yeah, so I mean, I think within that category, I think it’s important to focus on how AI is going to hopefully reduce the cost of legal services. I think that’s been whether it’s more working looking for pastor or lawyers being able to work more independently, like a real platform like ours. I think that’s like, that’s when we would all be watching on when do we start to see hourly rates that are continuing to go up, go down?

Greg Lambert 48:23
So Marlene, what’s your bet? billable rates and legal costs gonna go up or down this year? It’s a trick question.

Marlene Gebauer 48:34
They’re gonna go up. So, um, I like, I really liked this, this product. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s more for the small practitioner, you know, small practice small firms, solo practitioners, who, you know, can’t always get the same sort of support structure that you can and a large firm mean is, that’s one of the benefits, one of the draws of being at Big laws that, you know, you have a lot of the services and things available to you that, you know, it was not something you do, you know, when you’re solo and, you know, Brian and his company, that’s, you know, that’s what they’re doing. They’re sort of helping them with all of the, you know, the admin and, and sort of non legal practice stuff that, you know, can really take a lot of time so that practitioners can can practice and I think I think there’s really a market for that. I’m so I’m I’m eager to see what happens with with Hey Counsel.

Greg Lambert 49:43
Yeah, and I think his overall vision may eventually come to fruition. But it this is a big industry that set in its ways and even with all the excitement with the technology. Changing the the the business structure and reducing costs. I think that’s a that’s a longer term goal. But again, I hope it comes through.

Marlene Gebauer 50:15
Yeah, we’ll come back in a year see what happens. So Kathy Zhu, no, Cathy shoe, you say what is it?

Greg Lambert 50:27
I’m gonna say shoe, but she’s going to tell us how it’s really said.

Stephanie Curcio 50:32
Okay, my name is Kathy Zhu. And I’m the co founder and CEO of GMO, I just streamline the legal front door and how people team, we have legal teams work much more effectively and efficiently with the business. We collect all of the requests on the business, in the tools that they’re currently using and that they love. So there’s no change management. And we convert that into our streamline, we have my workflow, automation Radek where it needs to go, we have an audit trail, or reporting and metrics as well as backwards. So the GC has everything they need to make data driven decisions. Yeah, so we have several really exciting AI features that we’re releasing next year that we’re really, really thrilled about. So a lot of product development is coming your way next year. So we’re actually focused on in house legal teams, rather than law firms. And for in house legal, what’s really critical to solve right now is a process problem. There, I think a lot of attention and focus has been on document management, CLM, and document problems. But that means that there’s still a massive hole when it comes to concept, legal team desperately need, better metrics and better reporting to run more efficiently and to also advocate for legal value in the business.

Greg Lambert 51:40
Change managers management and process. I think AI can help with both of those.

Marlene Gebauer 51:48
So Kathy was also one of the finalists at the TLTF. And people were very, very excited about this tool. There was a lot of buzz, a lot of talk about it.

Greg Lambert 52:05
And what was the part that people were excited about?

Marlene Gebauer 52:09
Well, I will tell you, like literally, I saw some guy come up to her. And he was like, Thank God, he goes, You don’t understand. I’m just like, deluged with like emails every day from every, you know, every business department saying Help me with this helped me with that. And like, I don’t know, I can’t manage all of them. I mean, literally, he was he was, like, overjoyed. And so, I mean, this this, you know, unlike some of the ones we’ve talked about before, this is specifically for, you know, in house legal teams, and that’s how she’s marketing it. And so I think, you know, there’s clearly a need, because there was such a reaction, you know, and she’s, again, she’s talking about the process, like, I mean, he’s in house legal teams, you know, particularly for large companies, like, they’re responsive to all the different departments, and they have to juggle all of this, and I’m sure I’m, you know, my guess is that each of those different departments have a different way of doing things. And you know, your legal team has to kind of figure this stuff out. And they have to turn it around really fast. So, hey, I need to understand what this contract says. And, you know, you have to turn that around quickly. So yeah, AI can certainly help with that, you know, if you have templates, where you can extract stuff, and you can summarize stuff using Gen AI. Yeah, you know, that would, that would be great. They could turn around and say something right away. And, you know, we’ve talked about before, you know, bad processe is bad process. So if there’s something that can streamline that and make it more consistent, that’s got to be helpful.

Greg Lambert 53:49
Yeah, yeah. It’s really hard to scale bad processes. So

Marlene Gebauer 53:56
but I like What was she saying? It’s like, basically, it overlays. Like, they don’t know what has to change. So I mean, I haven’t seen this thing in action. But if if nobody has to change, you know, that’s got something going for it.

Greg Lambert 54:10
Yeah, I did not see that. But when I hear that, red flags go up, in my mind, okay, like no one has to change. We’ll see. So, okay. But like I said, I did not see the product. So next up is Cheryl Wilson. Griffin.

Cheryl Wilson Griffin 54:32
Okay, is this on? Hi, Cheryl Wilson Griffin here, CEO of legal tech consultants. I’m here at the legal tech, fund summit in Miami and excited for 2024 I think, because it’s the golden age of legal access, so what I’m going to call it we’re gonna feed new combinations of data both internal and external brought on not just by AI, but by increased interoperatability, API, better innovation. I think what’s the marrying of the external and external data at law firm in a way, the benefits clients that we’ve never seen it before or really never anticipated it.

Greg Lambert 55:10
Yeah, now she’s singing my song on on this, and this is something that I’ve been talking about for 25 years is you have to be able to marry the external information and the internal information and make the result better than the two individual pieces. And so I think again, and you notice that she said this, not an AI, only issue is here to talk about interoperability interoperability, whoo. I can’t I couldn’t even say at one time slow. So, you know, in marrying these internal external data points, you know, is the dream. So I’m glad, you know, last year, if it wasn’t for AI, I thought all we were going to be talking about was API’s. And, unfortunately, that kind of got to push to the background, but I think it’s, you got to have that in order to have that. The ability to combine all of that all the valuable information that you have, and all the valuable information that’s available.

Marlene Gebauer 56:27
Yeah, we still have to figure out the best way to get the information and to and to decide which information is important. Like, I mean, this is all kind of before what she’s talking about, like once, you know, what’s the best way to get it to us, and digest it? And then what do we actually care about? And let’s because it’s so easy to just get like a ton of data, both internally or externally. And then it’s like, okay, you know, what do I do with this? You know, and I, you know, I see questions about that. It’s like, again, I have all this stuff, and you know, is it in the right format? You know, can it be integrated? In the sort of niggling detail questions that need to be answered before you can actually, you know, sort of get to where, where she’s going on this, so but she’s absolutely right. Next up, we have Adam Miller,

Greg Lambert 57:30
ready for some web3 discussions Marlene?

Marlene Gebauer 57:33
Yeah.

Adam Miller 57:35
I went with Adam Miller. I’m a co founder of MIDAO, which stands for Marshall Island, DAO, and we’re building the best legal framework in the world for web three and DAO. I’m also the host of the Just DAO It podcast where people’s starting DAOs.. So DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, which makes it sound even more confusing that it is. It’s everyone organizations, that can be a good word to charity and association, any type of organization that wants to use the blockchain to track at the ownership or its membership, to do governance like voting on chain, and also to keep your money on chain rather than in a bank account. And so by doing all this stuff on the blockchain, you get insurance compliance, you get transparency, you can you can run and scale organizations much faster and easier than you can using traditional legal documents, for example, to keep company organized. So, you know, today I would say probably about 5% of people have heard of DAOs, I think, by the end of 2024 50% of people that, try it. Yeah. And that’s true, pretty much all over the world. I mean, DAOs, if you go back about a year, they were probably about 10,000, DAOs now they’re at about 50,000 DAOs. By the end of 2024 there could be hundreds of 1000s of DAOs. And by that point in time, the most people will have heard of them. And probably as long as a Bull market has returned in 2024. With seemed possible, maybe even likely, people are going to be interested in finding like, what’s that next big crypto thing? Dow is going to be one of those next big crypto things. And so I think a lot of people will be looking for Dallas to join there for fun or to speculate or for whatever reason.

Greg Lambert 59:14
Yep. You’ve heard the DAOs before, have you not Marlene?

Marlene Gebauer 59:20
I will admit when when I was talking to him, I was like, I have not heard of this before. And so we had a very nice conversation about what it is. So

Greg Lambert 59:28
yeah, Chad Main, at the technically legal podcast had a guest on a few weeks ago that talked about DAOs. Again, let me let me make sure I get that right. Because I think yeah, I think we may have been talking when

Marlene Gebauer 59:45
I’m making corrections to our transcript right now cuz it’s like, oh, I’m looking at this. It’s like it didn’t recognize DAO.

Greg Lambert 59:51
DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. And you’re seeing this in crypto like even to DEI, I saw a news feature where one of the one of the crypto coins called 1inch is now setting up a DAO in as part of the that crypto currency. So, really interesting. I still even after listening to the Chad’s podcast and reading a little bit on it, still a little a little bit behind. But remember, folks, if if this is the first time you heard about DAOs, then you heard it here on The Geek in Review.

Marlene Gebauer 1:00:40
Next, next person up is Andrea Markstrom, who is the CEO for Sheltie, Roth, and Zabel and a good friend of the podcast.

Greg Lambert 1:00:49
Yeah, good to have her on here.

Andrea Markstrom 1:00:50
Hi, I’m Andrea Markstrom, Chief Information Officer for Schulte Roth & Zabel. Excited to be here at the Legal Tech Summit. And, you know, the opportunity to meet some amazing legal tech startups. Thank you for having us. There is so much opportunity to not only, you know, do some great things entirely within firms, but also let’s bring your clients in, and introduce them to not only new tech, new technologies, new tools, but also to raise the bar in terms of how we deliver service. So I think that the huge opportunity for everyone in 2024 and then the other thing I think we should focus on is just outside of service for our firms and for our clients, it’s how can we bring AI or technology for good and give back to our community. And that is a big opportunity whereI think that we can all come together as an industry and do it in 2024.

Greg Lambert 1:01:54
Yeah, Andrea is always looking at how can we do good? How can we make not just our business better, but how can we make, you know, society, we just do better community better and do better. So I really appreciate that approach to it. And I did want to say one thing is, and we’ve we’ve been talking for months, damn near a year now about how we should be able to leverage the excitement for generative AI within our law firms to find real solutions, even if that means not AI. Lawyers should also leverage this with their clients, as their clients are looking for innovative ways to approach their business problems. And that’s one of the things you hear is companies don’t have legal problems, they have business problems that they need you to solve. And I think if if you are a lawyer, and you’re not taking advantage of the excitement, and the expectation that your clients are having, you’re missing a big opportunity.

Yeah, Andrea. Pod dog,

Pod dog made an appearance.

Marlene Gebauer 1:03:12
We’re gonna try that again.

Greg Lambert 1:03:15
Well, it wouldn’t be a show of pod dog didn’t make an appearance.

Marlene Gebauer 1:03:18
It’s true. It’s true. It’s true. So, you know, she’s just guarding me from everything. But the Andrea is always an inspiration to me, you know, every time I sort of get down in the weeds, you know, and down in the doldrums, you know, she says things like this and reminds me about, like, the good that, you know, we we do and can do as an industry. And, you know, then my heart feels good again. So, thanks, Andrea, for that. And, you know, I like that she, you know, that she highlights that, what this conference is about, because it’s not, I don’t know that it’s super well known. And but you know, you can learn but you can also bring, you know, you can bring your clients to learn, you know, you can bring your, you know, firm leaders to learn and to connect with this community. So, you know, she really highlighted kind of what’s, you know, the, the importance of a conference like this. And, you know, I was glad that that, you know, she said that because, you know, I think that’s something others need to know.

Greg Lambert 1:04:27
Yeah, I think we’re gonna kind of dovetail that in fact, I kind of moved the arrangement around a little bit so that Bill Henderson did, which I don’t notice that people know. And so I think this kind of dovetails nicely with what we just heard from Andrea.

Marlene Gebauer 1:04:45
He was the first person Yeah.

Bill Henderson 1:04:52
My name is Bill Anderson. I’m a professor of law at Indiana University, Mauer School of law and also the editor of Legal Evolution. I’m here at the it the legal tech fund summit in Miami, Florida. And I can tell you for sure that anything related to business to business or lawyer to lawyer enterprise stuff area is well taken care of by the venture capitalists, I’m particularly interested in things that are related to access to justice, though and so I’m looking for stuff that that that might be on the horizon that would be related to use of generative AI in access to justice in for people law. I saw an absolutely amazing presentation by the woman from The Second Chance Initiative, which is an organization that does passing legislation for expungement, automatic expungement that picks up half of all states and then there is ancillary services and tech solutions. In fact leaking, knew that get people cut and canceled, I was absolutely amazed and blown away the Entrepreneur that had this experience. She was convicted of a very low level crime but it traveled with her, it interfered with her ability to get a job, to get rental housing, to pay for her kids to schooling. And now she raised $75M for a non-profit and I am really interested in that and if I go home only learning about that, this conference will more than be worth it.

Greg Lambert 1:06:42
Yeah, Bill, I love Bill’s enthusiasm on that and his focus on Access to Justice, which, you know, you go back to the statistics, you know, something like 80% of the people are underserved in, in the legal in their legal needs here in the United States. And so got it just seems like AI is, you know, a great tool to help kind of narrow that down. Even if even if you chop off a few percentage points, it’s a lot of people that would otherwise go go unserved. So and I think his example of the Second Chance initiative, and they’re working at expungements, so that people can get, you know, some of that albatross off of their necks and move on with their life without, you know, forever being punished for something that, in the great scheme of things may not matter and what they need to do today.

Marlene Gebauer 1:07:44
Yeah, so I think Bill highlighted again, another aspect of the TLTF. Summit, is that there, there was this focus on on access justice, I did see this presentation. And I mean, there were tears in the audience, and some of them were mine. You know, it was, it was very move, it was very moving. And just really incredible what, what they’ve been able to do, and I do hope that we can get some representatives on for the future for the podcast. You know, another thing I’ll highlight is, you know, again, sort of the giving back aspect of the, of the summit, you know, one of the evenings, you know, one of the the, one of the activities was that there was a number of local charities where you would participate. So you were like building bikes, or, you know, you were interacting with so, you know, dogs for adoption, you were building different things. And so this is something that, you know, you could, you know, all of us, you know, a number of us, basically, we’re doing different ones, and that was, you know, that was sort of the key that was like the key activity for the evening, which I thought was pretty cool and very different. So again, that just kind of goes back to to what the conference does. And, you know, I agree with Bill that that again, I mean, if you could just sort of go away with that. Then, you know, you’ve you’ve you’ve gotten, you’ve gotten a lot out of out of out of the summit.

Greg Lambert 1:09:22
All right. Well, Marlene, are you ready for our last person?

Marlene Gebauer 1:09:27
Our last one.

Greg Lambert 1:09:29
So this is Jacob Beckerman from macro.com.

Marlene Gebauer 1:09:32
Jake from macro Beckerman.

Jacob Beckerman 1:09:34
I run macro.com We make a document editor basically a complete replacement for Word, Acrobat,Litera Compare AI powered. We make it easy to edit, red line and whatever you got? So I think we had a massive AI revolution in 2023, But it does actually take a while to productize those. So productization of all of the advancements building those in thoughtful ways into products that people can use. I think the first wave was a little bit of party tricks. And hopefully hopefully next year we can build some really good software.

Greg Lambert 1:10:17
So a lot of

Marlene Gebauer 1:10:18
Party Tricks!

Greg Lambert 1:10:19
Party tricks this year novelties, party trick, cigars. Yeah, we’re joking, but I think he’s right. I think we saw a lot of things that looked good. But if you scratched the surface a little bit was, you know, essentially a wrapper on on some tools that may change over time and make this initial product completely obsolete in a matter of days. So what do you see? Do you think we’re ready to go beyond party tricks?

Marlene Gebauer 1:10:56
It was funny, like, I was listening, just now that I heard party tricks. And I immediately I don’t know why this came to mind. But I thought of Fred and George for from Harry Potter. And what is it? What is it? Is it Zonks Emporium or something that they they run with, with the different jokes? So I think I, you know, I get what he’s saying. You know, what I mean? Think about it, when we started out, like we were talking about, like, Hey, can write you a birthday poem or a song or, you know, it can do all of your, your headshot pictures are half you and you know, picture of you in some weird universe and stuff. And so it was it was like fun. But, you know, sort of useful, but not super useful. But I do think we, we move very rapidly into areas where in fact, it wasn’t as useful. And, you know, is that kind of the detail, highly specific type of legal work, you know, maybe, you know, editing of documents, if it’s got to be really, you know, tight? No, probably not. But, you know, when we’re talking about initial drafts, you know, emails, you know, emails with feeling, you know, those types of things it does do, and does pretty well, like summary, summarizing things, you know, it does. So, I, you know, I think this year is going to be a lot more exploration. I mean, for for organizations that are using it, taking a look at what people are using it for, kind of running those tests, seeing if those are valuable use cases. And, you know, marketing that marketing that further, because, you know, there’s going to be a million different ways people use these things. It’s just a question of, you know, from an organizational perspective, what are you going to promote? That’s, that’s going to have a business impact?

Greg Lambert 1:12:59
Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, people are beyond the, you know, the awe and shock that we initially saw in 2023. And now it’s going to be, you know, where’s the beef? You know, where, where is the actual thing that is going to going to actually change the way that I practice law, or I write documents or review documents? Or do my daily work?

Marlene Gebauer 1:13:29
I love that. Go ahead.

Greg Lambert 1:13:33
No, no, no, I know, I that. I get this you know, there’s a reason I have gray hairs. So I can

Marlene Gebauer 1:13:38
I love that you combined and 80s reference with Gen AI? No, I, you get you get points for that. You definitely get points for that.

Greg Lambert 1:13:47
All right. Well, that was the end of the interviews that you did. Again, Marlene, thank you very much for going down there. And talking with all these people. You know, a lot of times people asked me, What’s the biggest benefit of having a podcast like this, is the fact that if it weren’t for this, there really would be no good reason for us to go up and talk to 17-18 different people and get their, you know, quick opinions on something. So this, this gives us that opportunity to meet people beyond our sphere. And that. So thank you for exposing that.

Marlene Gebauer 1:14:28
and connect and connect them, you know, connect to them, both connect guests with guests and connect guests with, you know, other members of our firm. So, you know, really quite a benefit.

Greg Lambert 1:14:41
Yeah, it sure is. So, thank you very much. And again, thanks to the 18 different folks that talk to us, both at the AI conference in New York and at the TLTF summit in Miami.

Marlene Gebauer 1:14:58
Yes and and thanks You everybody who took the time to sit with me and do the interviews, apologies for the sound, you know, we live in learn. And you know, I certainly have. So I will make sure that next time it’s a better spot

Greg Lambert 1:15:14
have different problems, it’ll just be different.

Marlene Gebauer 1:15:16
They’ll have different problems like you know, but we’ll try it, we’ll try and find a quiet corner someplace. So, and I want to say thank you to our audience, for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. You know, we really do appreciate you taking the time to listen, we appreciate hearing from you, and hearing how you know how impactful this podcast is on all of you. So thankfully, thank you for that. 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 on LinkedIn, or on x at @gebauerm and on Threads at @mgebauer66.

Greg Lambert 1:15:56
And I can be reached on LinkedIn and I think one of my resolutions for 2024 may be to finally just let go of x. We’ll see we’ll see I’m still on there at @glambert. But I’ll also keep an eye out on Threads and you can reach me there at @glambertpod.

Marlene Gebauer 1:16:16
So threads and Instagram seem to be connected. Have you seen that? Yeah, they are. They are so yep, there’s some there’s that I’m not an expert. I’m not really like there but I’m not really the poster. I’m not really doing anything so and also want to say thank you to Jerry David DeCicca who is the creator of the music that you hear on The Geek in Review podcast so thank you Jerry!

Greg Lambert 1:16:43
That is someone we are not giving up on in the new year.

Marlene Gebauer 1:16:46
Absolutely not. No AI generated music

Greg Lambert 1:16:52
All right, well thanks everyone and Happy New Year.

Marlene Gebauer 1:16:54
Happy New Year all.