In this episode of The Geek in Review podcast, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert welcome back Richard Tromans, founder of Artificial Lawyer, after his year-and-a-half sabbatical. Tromans shares his insights on the impact of generative AI on the legal industry and discusses his upcoming Legal Innovators conferences in California and London.

Tromans observes that while the legal industry is generally enthusiastic about the potential of generative AI, there is a stark contrast in the perception of its impact outside the legal bubble. He believes that the technology will have a significant effect on the legal sector, but it will be mostly benign, with the potential to add value to the profession once the hype and cynicism subside.

The key to real transformation, according to Tromans, lies in integrating AI throughout the entire business process, rather than using it as a mere helper tool. This integration should encompass document management systems, knowledge management capabilities, templates, and precedents. However, he emphasizes that the current economic model of the legal industry must adapt to the technology for true transformation to occur.

Tromans also discusses the upcoming Legal Innovators California conference in San Francisco, which will focus on generative AI, standardization, and the infrastructure needed to support the evolving legal landscape. The event will feature speakers from law firms, in-house legal departments, academia, and major tech companies.

Looking ahead, Tromans believes that the biggest challenge for the legal industry over the next two to five years will be the willingness of clients and law firms to embrace change and rethink their processes. He argues that the industry could have adopted AI-driven solutions years ago, but the impetus to do so was lacking. The success of this “gentle revolution” will depend on the ability of clients and law firms to challenge assumptions and adapt to the changing technological landscape.

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Transcript

Marlene Gebauer 0:07
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. Well, this week we have a talk with Richard Tromans. Who is Richard, you’re looking great for coming off a sabatical. And you’ve just jumped right back into your work there at Artificial Lawyer. So Richard, thanks for taking time away from all this writing I’m sure that you’re doing to talk with us here at The Geek in Review.

Richard Tromans 0:37
Yeah, then thank you. Greg. Thank you, Marlene. Yeah, it’s, it’s already incredibly busy. I think I published four stories today. So Artificial Lawyers is back.

Greg Lambert 0:48
Yeah. I think I’ve published four stories this year.

So Richard, the big question on everyone’s mind is, what the heck does someone do for a year and a half on a sabbatical?

Marlene Gebauer 1:03
Yeah, we want to know,

Richard Tromans 1:05
Easy is easy, easy. Honestly, it feels like I’ve been away from. If you’ve told me I’d been away for two months. I would say that kind of realistic. That’s how it feels. When really fast. So I did a bit of traveling to California, obviously, as you as you’ll hear a bit more about California later in the show. I’ve been writing a book of fiction, not not about legal, and may write a book that looks like I’ve been asked several times by publishers. So you wrote a book about legal tech. And I may well,

Legal tech fiction?

but instead know what I did. I actually think very, very early on. I did think about hey, what about, like, John Grisham with legal tech? And then I said. No., it’s, I don’t think it’s an area conducive.

Greg Lambert 1:55
You’d rather go where there’s an audience?

Richard Tromans 1:57
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer 1:59
I bet there’s an audience?

Richard Tromans 2:02
Yeah, I don’t know. Like, a legal engineer uncovers an incredible plot to subvert an NDA or something. I don’t know. Who knows? But um, yeah.

Greg Lambert 2:14
Got me on the edge of the seat.

Marlene Gebauer 2:18
Well, if you need editor if you if you need proof readers, just you know, let us know.

Richard Tromans 2:22
I might take you up.

Marlene Gebauer 2:23
Yeah. So, Richard, since you went on sabbatical, like since November of 2022. You know, you may have noticed there was a little bit of buzz around that time regards to, you know, this thing called generative AI. How have you been looking at the overall real effect that that breakthrough in AI has made on the legal industry?

Richard Tromans 2:51
Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, I was covering it before I went. So for example, I think I was the first person to do a ultimate product walkthrough, did it with ALTV of Spellbook, which is, you know, very well known. But I did that in I think, November 2022. I did LLM study you know about on Patent Pal. There was a couple of PCs about LLMs in general. So it was kind of kicking off just before I left. And then as I went through the year, I was following it. But I think, you know, the big insight that I had from being outside LegalTech was just how different the appreciation, or lack of appreciation are LLMs. And generative AI in general, is outside of a legal bubble. Inside the legal world, people are generally enthusiastic and there is a bit of reticence and a few people doing dumb things like doing case law research on ChatGPT. But let’s think about this as outliers. Generally, amongst legal tech people with a lot of positivity, it’s, it’s seen as a very powerful tool, it’s very positive. Not a lot of negative, people don’t really think it’s going to create the loss of jobs and so forth. Outside of that, we need to you gotta like California, again. The people they were striking most of last year, anywhere in the world, creative world and studio, world actors, designers, artists, voiceover people. I mean, it’s gonna have a really, really significant impact. And then you’ve got all of this, it was a whole ton of stuff. But anyway, we’re here to talk about legal tech and legal innovation. But I think the long and short of it is out in the big world. Generally, they are it’s gonna cause a lot of good and a lot of bad. I think we’ve got to be honest about that. In the legal world. Strangely, it seems to be mostly I say 99% benign, once you take hype away, and sort of the pointless nihilistic criticism on the other side, which is just like a polar opposite of the the hype, really, than the general consensus is that this is all had been very positive. So I’m feeling pretty good about it. I’m feeling glad that I came back now, which perhaps is going to be your next question. Because the last 12 months has just been a lot of hype and a lot of cynicism, which kind of cancels each other out and actually very little absence and a lot of law firm in house, internal legal tech groups, innovation groups, they’re only really now getting to grips with it and actually getting real outputs.

Greg Lambert 5:26
So I was gonna ask you on it. I really don’t think, Yeah, Marlene and I gave a presentation recently at the Houston sociation law libraries. And we kind of looked at the Gartner Hype Cycle and kind of looked at it and said, we’re kind of dead, right in the middle of the trough of disillusionment of the Gen, generative AI ai at the moment. And so, you know, as you’ve been kind of standing back and watching things unfold, are you are you actually seeing any actual transformation yet? Are you still seeing everyone saying, wow, there’s a lot of potential here, but not a lot of action yet.

Richard Tromans 6:16
It’s starting, it’s starting. I mean, you know, I’m starting, it really started. I mean, it’s this, they’re beginning the journey of integrating what NLM can do with other technology, and building it into their work processes. And for me, I don’t know, if you’ve read a couple of the articles that I wrote recently, since I got back, you know, so we generative AI ai has split the legal information atom. Now what, and the point of that article, and I’ll send you, I’ll send you a link. It’s basically to say, there’s a lot of people shaving an hour or two of various work processes, you know, like Doc review, or, you know, helping to draft clauses. So for for contract generation. But what we’re really lacking, and this is really the beginning of real change, is when people stop just thinking, thinking of it as like a little helper, you know, Santos, little helper GPT-4 Little Helper. And to start, think of it as something that they’re going to integrate all the way through their business or way through the product legal way through the production lines. So it’s connecting to the DMS is connected to all of your knowledge management capabilities is connected to all of your templates, it’s going to sort of your precedence there is you don’t have to worry about prompting everything yourself, because all the system prompts and master prompts been built in and built in and built in on so many layers and so many levels, that partner coming to a piece of work and just get straight into it. We’re not there yet. And also, because part of that is pricing is that you can’t you can’t divorce the tech from the the economics. Bizarrely, actually, while I was away, I was asked to write part of a paper for Wolters Kluwer on that I made this point that, you know, legal technology has not transformed the legal world at all, except really in ediscovery. Because the vast majority of legal activity has not adapted itself to the technology. You cannot have a transformation or change via technology. If the economic model is still over anointing century, doesn’t they just don’t go together. And interestingly, ediscovery moved really rapidly out of a law firms out of the bill of flour, into a very, very, very smart combination of people and technology. And it did that way before a lot of the AI stuff came along. They were out in France for real pioneers in that respect. And what we need is everything else to follow suit.

Greg Lambert 8:55
Yeah, yeah. And speaking of ediscovery, you know, I’ve kind of been I mean, let me get your opinion on this. I’ve been a little bit shocked at how little the eDiscovery that’s true. Companies have done to kind of take the technology and in the processes that they’ve already set up over the years. And not Why are you and I know that DISCO is doing part of that with their Cecilia servient is doing a really good job. I think, from the two of them. I think Serbians probably doing more of a job trying to become more of an AI tool than an ediscovery tool or at least a leader. Are you seeing anything? Are you kind of surprised by the lack of ediscovery not leading this?

Richard Tromans 9:48
Oh, well, I mean, there are some interesting things like Relativity is doing some interesting stuff, for example, that I mean, perhaps it’s partly because they were so out in front for so long, and it was such a tear. played area of the legal world, that they’re so deeply embedded in the in the way that they’ve been working very hard to then just completely tear it down. For example, visits going completely off, you’ve discovered through, I was talking to a company, the works in real estate review. They spent two years using traditional traditional, the drawing was processing machine learning system, you know, the equivalent of Kiera. But they were making their own version, just all real estate documents. And they said they were just about to release this technology to the wider world. And then ChatGPT arrived and the missile the wider implications and got into they started digging into technology. And they basically said, Well, we’ve got to do it all over again. Because the kinds of things that are going to be useful for the clients like being able to ask generalistic questions in natural language, or even asked questions that are kind of very obtuse. Uh, you know, is there something I’m missing here that you can’t you can’t with a traditional healer, literal language NLP system, you can’t type in bizarre questions, strange questions, you have to have very, very clear questions. I mean, you have to train her up a little bit yourself and get the accuracy that you want. And Olympus can do can do all the edge cases, the edge question does really, really nicely. And I think probably the answer is going to be a bit of a combination of the two. I saw a bit of research a while ago on it, I think there’s a law firm being made was it suddenly asked him I can’t remember, was looking at uses for ediscovery. And they were just showing that a sort of combination of more traditional machine learning, with an LLM approach combined, really answered a lot of questions.

Marlene Gebauer 11:41
I’m curious, because we’re, you know, you’re talking about how we’re going to integrate this into processes. Is this kind of a build situation? Or is this more of a buy situation? You know, it’ll be I know that there are Microsoft is looking at things, but you know, what, this concerns about it touching things?

Richard Tromans 12:02
Well, I mean, Microsoft’s interesting, I was talking to one head of innovation, he was basically saying that CO pilots, the Microsoft co pilots, even you know, running through as you are, or whatever it is, it just wasn’t producing the kind of results that a lawyer would want. So I mean, what most people are doing that I’ve seen, they’re using a combination. So somebody might be using Harvey spellbook. They’re running their own version of GPT-4. Whether it’s whatever the whatever the system they’re using, and they’re using all of these things in combination. And then also, I mean, there’s so many barriers, I mean, people really haven’t started connecting it properly to the DMS yet. And that’s because there’s worries over data security and things like that. But, you know, we will get there, we will get there. And then you start to bring in all the other tools. I mean, what we’ve got at the moment is jigsaw, we’ve got a jigsaw of tools. And we’re nowhere near yet bringing it all together into a coherent structure. It’s interesting to see that I think Thomson Reuters, for example, and LexisNexis, as well, are really trying to do this. They’re really trying to thread all the pieces together. Ironically, though, even though this is a welcome move, you speak to a lot of legal tech people inside law firms, they’ll say we don’t want just one system, we want to pick and choose you want to customize, you want to build, we want to slot in the bits we want. So we’ll see where that goes. But there has to be ultimately we have to redesign the processes just dropping a tool here and a tool there to kill an hour to kill an hour there will not going to break the Standard Model. Standard Model is going to be with us forever. It is rather like a think of a coal powered power station, right? In the Midwest, churning out smoke and everything right? And they say, but we’re really quite green. We’ve got this like little like, windmill thing, you know, wind turbine on the top. But it doesn’t change the the overall structure. The structure is still massively inefficient. It’s still burning billable hours, you might say, right. It’s highly calorific. legal work, but it’s generating lots of negative side effects. So we’re miles away from getting there. But I think people are starting to think about it, it seems to never, I mean, otherwise, as I mentioned in that previous article, it’s just going to become a legal tech fossil, it’s going to become part of the legal tech fossil record. Right, we shouldn’t be a tragedy. And it’s gonna be really weird, because then what would happen is that LegalTech would become like this kind of sad little island, then the rest of society would move on around it getting better and better at using generative AI technology, that for us, we just be like, Oh, well, we saved an hour on a due diligence exercise that was 2000 hours long, which isn’t gonna get us anywhere. So there’s, I think it’s more or less forcing the law firms to rethink their processes.

Marlene Gebauer 14:57
And I’m also curious, you know, there’s a A lot of talk about like, prompting and how to tell the models what to do. And there’s debate about that, like people are saying, you know, you know, profit engineers are going to be prevalent. There’s other people saying that, that’s going to go away. But I mean, I feel it’s some, you know, it’s some level, you’re going to have to have somewhere, you’re going to have to have expertise and how to make this work, whether you’re in the background, setting things up, so that that, you know, front end users aren’t going to have to think about it. Or if you’re a front end user, and you need to, you need to customize. And I’m thinking, you know, where do you where do you see that, in terms of sort of moving in, in terms of like getting this more process oriented?

Richard Tromans 15:43
Yeah, it’s got, it’s got to be a front end back end scenario, there are always going to be some people who are hobbyists, in the same way that you can give a standardized NDA, to most lawyers, they’ll just accept it and say, I don’t care, let’s just get on with the deal, because that’s where the interesting work is, other people would take the entire NDA apart and rewrite it word for word, right? They’re a small minority, I think it’s gonna be the same stuff with promptly I think the smarter firms, whether they’re just bringing in external tools, which they can customize a bit, or they’re completely building from the ground up, using a GPT-4 base, something similar, they will do have a system prompting, in the master prompting, and some of them will actually even get as far as actually refining as well on their own data through Question and Answer combinations to really sort of fine tune. But all of that should be on the back end. Right, you want as little confusion as possible when you hand it to the clients, or internal clients, in which case this partner or an associate? Good, because it’s going to get really weird, because you’re gonna have a situation where people are being expected to perform an action, which is part of a longer process with a degree of predictability and risk reduction. And then you’ll have different people getting completely randomly different results, because they’re asking prompts in very different ways. So you want to try and narrow down the variability, you want to get maximum results, that you want to try and reduce that sort of crazy breadth of risk that you get with with prompting at the moment. I mean, it’s crazy isn’t you just change like a few words in a prompt, and you’ll get a radically different response. So that common

Marlene Gebauer 17:27
And you chage the words at all, and you still get a different response.

Richard Tromans 17:32
And legal column, aren’t do do with that it’s a waste of time as well. It’s a waste of time. And when you’ve got a partner, whatever is billing out $2,000 An hour or something, and he’s wasted. She’s wasted 30 minutes, dropping in different prompts. So that we should just be like, I want this information. The tech team in the back has done on the prompting for you.

Marlene Gebauer 17:56
Got it. So I am very excited to say that in June, you have a legal innovators California conference going on in San Francisco. So it’s a two day event. It focuses on law firms for day one, and then in house and legal ops for day two. So tell us what some of the themes are. And some of the speakers, you know, and who you’re excited to have at the conference in California.

Richard Tromans 18:23
Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so yeah, a little innovators California. It’s a US events in San Francisco on June 4 And 5th in the center. Tickets are on sale now. Speakers, we’ve got a fantastic bunch. We’ve only inhersight. We’ve got Google, META. We’ve got Salesforce, we from academia, we got people like Megan Maher from Stanford who’s a sort of renowned generative AI ai and AI expert. On the law firm side, we’ve got people like David Wang from Wilson Sonsini, we’ve got Orrick, we’ve got Gunderson, we’ve got investors coming over, because we’re gonna have a little bit of time talking about investments. And also we’re going to encourage them in smaller companies to sort of not exactly pitch to the investors, but do a presentation where they can probably get a bit of input and feedback from investors as well. So if you are a startup, and you’re listening to this, drop us a light, let’s see if we can get you in it I think there’s gonna be in terms of the subjects, obviously, generative AI is going to be central, isn’t it? It’s got to be, but also standardization. If what I would like to see actually ever takes place, it’s not just going to be about productive forces. So a productive force is like an LLM, right. You know, it has a huge productive impact on a process that you’re trying to carry out. But you also need the infrastructure, and you also need to shape the channels of activity. So we’re going to need standardization, not just on NDA, but on sort of slightly more complex contracts as well and we’re gonna need to think much, much more about the the channel between law firms, clients, parties and counterparties. So there’s a whole I mean, of where I say it is is that there’s gonna be like an entire new infrastructure architecture that needs to be built. And it’s not that people weren’t saying this before. There are plenty of people who’ve been saying this for years. I think what’s happening now is that a generative AI is effectively pushed us up to this point where they can’t hold it back any longer. They’ve got to systematize things, they’ve got to think about things in a more logical way. This kind of ad hoc, well, it doesn’t matter. As long as I’m busy. As long as I’m billing, everything is good. And from the buy side, they’re like, Well, I don’t really know what they do. And I don’t really understand these, these items on the bill, but it looks big. And there are famous brands, I’m sure it’s fine. There helps pay it off. Shave off 20% completely randomly. Hey, it’s all cool. I mean, that seems like a bonkers way to run a market. Yeah, let me maybe maybe I don’t, maybe magic.

Greg Lambert 20:53
It’s hard to tell millionaires they are doing it wrong.

Richard Tromans 20:56
Well, exactly. But ultimately, this is the thing is, is what our legal services for legal services are not for lawyers, legal services that serve society and to serve the business. Amazingly, apparently, I read that somewhere, may not be right, I do think it could possibly be true, as a fact is true. And what we all doing, we’ve got to think, you know, from the top down, you know, how are we how are we running this sector for the benefit of everybody? Of course, you get incentivized, but no one’s gonna tell me that a corporate lawyer is not incentivized already. And do you think in the world of fixed fees and LLMs, standardization, they’re not going to be massively incentivized anyway, in fact, I don’t have the time to get into it here. But from a calculations, but I’ve been doing the last few weeks, I’ve been creating financial models for using technology, well, AI, primarily, automation and fixed fees, and mixes, associates and partners. And from what I can figure out so far, is that law firms are actually going to be more profitable using generative AI.

Greg Lambert 22:06
And make sense.

Marlene Gebauer 22:07
We’ll have you back to talk about that. Yeah. Sure. People want to hear about that.

Richard Tromans 22:13
A lot of lawyers side on the on the sell side on the sell side of the market. I don’t see lawyers being lost, because there is no point on the buy side. I think we could see some losses, particularly in contract management’s. But on the sell side, it’s not in the law firms interest to undermine their own earning power.

Greg Lambert 22:34
Yeah, yeah. Well, on the the conference coming up in June, who who’s the audience that you’re attracting for this one? And is the has the audience kind of shifted at all over over the past couple of years, who, who would be incentivized to come?

Richard Tromans 22:54
I think it’s always been similar people, it’s people bulk with, I guess, has two core groups, you’ve got a group who are really in the thick, that who are very much part of the innovation scene or the legal obscene, and effectively, they’re coming along to meet their peers, many of them will be living in California on the West Coast or in Washington States, or people will have flown over from the East Coast, also some people from the UK. And then I think there’s a whole bunch of people who are just curious, because I mean, California has a huge market share, I can take gigantic economy, a lot of lawyers, but I think it’s the second biggest legal market after New York, I think I was a lot of people who are just going to be there to learn. And I think I’m hoping that we will be interested in generative AI, that there’ll be a lot of local lawyers perhaps who are not experts in technology who want to come along to listen to the experts, from large companies from leading law firms, etc. So I think it will be a mix.

Marlene Gebauer 23:53
And that’s always cool. Because then it’s like, it’s it’s great when you get to talk to people sort of, with coming from from different perspectives. And you know, it’s always good to learn things that way.

Greg Lambert 24:03
Those have always been my most enjoyable meetings is greens, where, you know, there’s a mix of law firm, there’s a mix of in house, there’s a mix of vendors, there’s no academic. That’s where the real good conversations come in for me.

Marlene Gebauer 24:20
Exactly. But, Richard, you also have a legal innovators London conference coming up in November. So you’ve announced in in 2025, you’re going to actually add a third day to the London conference, which will be a litigation day. So that focuses on disputes on arbitration, eDiscovery, case law research, and I guess other litigation tools and services. So what’s the reasoning behind this this new edition coming in?

Richard Tromans 24:46
Yeah, well, I mean, I think it’s because I think it’s probably fair to say that the litigation world, the transactional world, at least in the UK, to some degree, maybe it’s because in the UK we have a split profession between barristers and clusters, it’s slightly different. The the transactional world tends to dominate legal tech and discussions around legal innovation. And yes, certainly on a global level, definitely in the US, litigation is 50% of the market, definitely in America, in the UK, amongst the big law firms, it’s still about maybe 30%, of the big law firms revenues. So I think it really needs something dedicated to it. And there’s just so much to talk about the eDiscovery disclosure, as it’s called, in the UK, case, law research, arbitration, you know, online dispute resolution, it just goes on. But it’s such a massive subject, I think, by the time we get to 2025, generative AI will really have impacted that area a lot. And again, if you look, if you look at where a lot of people are talking about generative AI, it’s transactional. It’s like helped me to draft his contracts. And we review this contract, it helped me to summarize this legislation. So I can talk to my clients about how we should draft this contract. It’s very, very transactional, transactional, ly orientated. So I thought, you know, let’s, let’s bring in the litigation side.

Greg Lambert 26:11
Yeah, yeah. And even even, I mean, you kind of pointed this out, even on the litigation side, it’s transactional. It’s about, like we had Damien on a little bit ago. And, and everything that he’s doing is pulling out metadata, asking questions, organizing the information. So it’s interesting, even within the litigation processes of it, the AI tools seem to be very transactional.

Richard Tromans 26:37
Yeah, I think I mean, just one last point on that is, is, how are we going to price it all that’s going to be fascinating on transactional work was a degree of well, it’s simpler. Because, you know, the Verizon endpoint that, you know, you’re trying to get to, we want to complete this merger. Yeah, we’ll do the due diligence, we’ll, you know, argue over various aspects of the deal and so forth. And, and there is an important, you know, there’s a merger, it’s all done. You can plan that you can benchmark it, there are probably deals that are actually very, very similar, you know, so you can start to bring in fixed fees, you can start to see how tech and pricing and virtual activity and lawyers all kind of fit together. With litigation. It’s totally totally different, isn’t it? Because you’ve got in the US, you got punitive damages? How do you call? How do you predict those? I mean, that’s an I think that’s gonna be one aspect, I think, is there’s been a lot of work up to now on using AI for predictive purposes. Where are we going to get in relation to using an LM? So crunching huge amounts of data to make predictions about it’s going to be interesting? Yeah, yeah. I mean, and also, I mean, I think we’ve got some really interesting ethical issues. I mean, I think we’ve contracts. It doesn’t I don’t think the ethical issues get that bad. I mean, is it an ethical issue to use an LLM to redraft a change of control clause? Or really as long as there’s a lawyer there? who’s trained and regulated looking at it and going, Okay, that’s good. The shoot a lawyer who’s in court or go to being caught, use noodle em to draft their speech? Should they should a judge the asking and allow them What do you think? Do you think he’s guilty? You read the evidence the same as me, what do you think?

Greg Lambert 28:36
The transcripts video in YouTube

Marlene Gebauer 28:42
They seems nice.

Greg Lambert 28:44
Even though the future is

Richard Tromans 28:49
also multimodal combinations? I mean, you know, you’ve got a video camera and the court is it’s downloading all the energy is some person probably already has developed a way of doing some kind of emotional response analysis for defendants. Who knows what, who knows where this is gonna go? There’s all kinds of interesting things.

Greg Lambert 29:14
Well, speaking of where things are gonna go, it’s time for our crystal ball questions. So we’ll have yet the pull out the crystal ball and pure into the future for us, Richard and so what, what kind of change or challenge do you see for the legal industry say over the next two to five years?

Richard Tromans 29:32
Okay, well,

Greg Lambert 29:34
that’s a long time now.

Richard Tromans 29:36
Yeah, well, I’m I would sum it up. And it’s always the same challenge. It’s always the things that were that I think we are about to do that have been instigated by the arrival of generative AI. We could have done five years ago. It would have been clunkier. The old machine learning systems were clunkier. Some of the automation systems and redrafting systems were clunkier, but we could have done it we just didn’t wasn’t the impetus to do it? I think the big challenge as ever is, will the clients finally finally say enough is enough? And do a kind of like ontological leap out of their own reality and go? Yeah, I was trained this way, I was trained to think this way I was taught that time is the ultimate measure of value. Which is ironic in a in an industry that’s primarily intellectual. It’s kind of bizarre. You know, we’re not like building bridges, we’re actually expressing ourselves in intellectual terms. But anyway, if they can get out of that, if they can then think about repricing if they can think about their own methods, and then say, well, if we’re starting to use technology more and more and more on our own contract management, when things get a bit more complex, and they go out, can we do the same? Can we demand the same our external lawyers, and then you just start to get the slow revolution? I mean, I don’t think it’s necessarily an evolution is actually think it is a revolution revolution is where something replaces something else, right. And evolution is where something morphs into something else, I think this will be a revolution, but it’s gonna be a slow one. It’s gonna be a gentle revolution. Right? And I think this is this is this is, you know, the $700 billion, you know, $800 billion, whatever it is, these days legal market question, will the clients and the law firm somehow get together and solve these big problems? Or are we going to be stuck in this kind of ad hoc manual labor, you know, high, high calorific, legal activity kind of world forever. And like I say, if that does happen, if we fail, at this challenge, the rest of the technological world will go around us will be like, will be like a vehicle stuck on the freeway, and all the other vehicles are going around it. Right? That’d be very sad. So I don’t think that will happen. I don’t think the owners of the large companies, the CFO is the CEO is the investors, activist hedge funds, and so forth, will let that happen. They’ll they’ll say, they’ll go down to the legal department and say, Look, even if you don’t want to change, you’ve got to change. Or, actually, I know you do want to change, you just need a bit of moral support and a bit of air cover, to say, this is cool, you can push back will stand behind you. It’s not always by IBM, that you’ll never go wrong. You know, let’s, let’s challenge some assumptions. But like I say, we might not we might not. But there is a real possibility that we come up to the fence. And we back off, we don’t jump. At that point. Like I said, risk will will come around us.

Greg Lambert 32:48
Yep. Never underestimate our ability to screw up a really good situation.

Marlene Gebauer 32:55
Well, definitely great food for thought. So thank you, Richard Tromans for talking with us today. Where can people find you and the Artificial Lawyer online? Yeah, thanks.

Richard Tromans 33:06
Um, it’s at as always artificiallawyer.com. And the conference, which is in San Francisco, June 4. And fifth is is a very long but very, very simple .com. It is legalinnovatorsCalifornia.com, it’s about that long. But if you just type in legal innovators into Google, and then you’ll probably see the one for California. And as mentioned, the tickets are now available.

Greg Lambert 33:39
And I’ll make sure that we get the links on the on the show notes as well.

Marlene Gebauer 33:43
And thanks to everyone, our audience for listening to The Geek in Review podcast. We’d love to hear from you. So please find us on social media sites like LinkedIn. The music you hear every week is from Jerry David DeCicca. And so we thank Jerry very much.

Greg Lambert 33:58
Thanks, Jerry. Thanks, Marlene.

Marlene Gebauer 34:00
Thank you