In this episode of The Geek in Review podcast, hosts Greg Lambert and Kate Boyd from Sente Advisors (standing in for Marlene Gebauer) sit down with Giles Thompson, Head of Growth, and Jun Choi, Growth Executive at Avvoka, to discuss the company’s innovative approach to document automation and the impact of generative AI on the legal industry.
Avvoka is a no-code document automation platform that enables legal professionals to streamline the creation and management of complex legal documents and contracts. The company has recently introduced AI-enhanced features such as SmartAutomation (with GenAI) and SmartConsolidation , which aim to simplify the process of building automations.
Giles and Jun highlight the differences in knowledge management practices between the US and UK, with the former being more technology-focused and the latter being more human-centric. Avvoka’s platform caters to both law firms and in-house legal teams, with clients ranging from Warner Brothers Discovery and McDonald’s to booking.com.
The company also hosts a vendor-agnostic community event series called “Logically Drafted,” which bring together legal professionals interested in document automation to share their experiences and insights. These events have gained traction globally, with upcoming sessions planned for Houston (Tuesday 18 June) and Chicago (Friday 21 June), and other cities.
Looking ahead, Avvoka is focusing on integrating generative AI technologies into its platform while ensuring data security and client control. The company is collaborating with clients to provide flexibility in terms of hosting and integrating large language models, allowing them to maintain control over their data and manage risks associated with these emerging technologies.
Giles and Jun emphasize the importance of being realistic about the capabilities and limitations of generative AI in the legal industry. They believe that document automation will continue to play a crucial role, with AI serving as an enhancement rather than a replacement for existing tools and processes. The key challenge for vendors like Avvoka will be to navigate the hype surrounding generative AI while delivering practical, value-driven solutions to their clients.
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Transcript
Greg Lambert 0:07
Welcome to The Geek in Review podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal profession. I’m Greg Lambert.
Kate Boyd 0:14
And I’m Kate Boyd, CEO at Sente Advisors standing in for Marlene this week. Sunday is a legal innovation consultancy, we’re tech agnostic. But in the interest of full disclosure, our team and clients have had really good experiences using Avvoka, the guest of today’s show, and we consider Avvoka to be friends of Sente.
Greg Lambert 0:34
All right. Well, Kate, thank you very much for stepping in and CO hosting this week. If the viewers haven’t seen we had Kate and her husband, Ryan McClead on our love and legal tech episode. So if you haven’t caught that, go catch it. It’s a lot of fun. So great to have you here.
Kate Boyd 0:52
Great to be here. Thanks.
Greg Lambert 0:53
All right. Well, this week’s guest are Giles Thompson, who is the head of growth at Avvoka. And Jun Choi, who is the growth executive at Avvoka. Giles and Gen AI, welcome to The Geek in Review.
Giles Thompson 1:07
Thank you so much.
Greg Lambert 1:08
So Giles, do you mind just kind of giving us an overview of Avvoka? And what the company does and what your role is there at the company? Yeah,
Giles Thompson 1:19
absolutely. So what Avvoka does primarily is we’re a document automation solution. And I like to call this the grantee explanation, it’s all it is, is essentially taking a document that could be a contract or something else entirely, perhaps a court form, uploading that to our platform. And then what that does is it automatically takes that document and then turns it into a questionnaire. There is some manual intervention, you know, perhaps in that process, but a lot of it is taken care of automatically. And then that questionnaire is used by a lawyer, but sometimes a commercial person to generate a contract or or indeed, a legal document. Usually, there’s a lot more to it. We facilitate collaboration, negotiation signature and that kind of thing. But the core thing we do is facilitate that process for people who do complex legal documents and complex contracts like loan facilities, FPGAs and licensing agreements. So
Greg Lambert 2:14
when you tell your grandmother this, Does she understand that?
Giles Thompson 2:18
That was that was maybe the anti explanation I bled blood into the answer.
Greg Lambert 2:26
So Giles, what what’s your role there at Avvoka?
Giles Thompson 2:28
Yeah, I’m head of growth, which is basically a newfangled startup term for heading up sales and marketing, and basically figuring out when the board asks for us to go grow quicker, how on earth we can do with, with various marketing budget and no additional staff. My background is legal. So I was at Herbert Smith, free hills, then Kirkland. And about four years ago, I joined with absolutely no idea what I was doing other than a real desire to help lawyers and to figure out what goes on inside their heads.
Kate Boyd 2:57
Jun, can you tell us quickly about your role?
Jun Choi 2:59
Oh, yes, I work closely with jobs. I’ve worked as part of Avvoka for the past two years as a growth executive. So I work with law firms, banks, corporates and in house teams across the world when it comes to document automation needs.
Kate Boyd 3:13
So we see Avvoka as really having a an innovative a once we get past that granny explanation, the way you approach this actually is really unique in the industry. I’m wondering if you can share just some details about recent advancements and things that are being introduced in the future that really make you stand out?
Jun Choi 3:33
Yeah, of course. So to any newbies to document automation of Avvoka is a no code document automation platform. What that means is you require zero coding experiences and knowledge to actually build in the automations, what we call placeholders and conditionalities, that form parts of your documents and contracts. Now, recently, in the past few months, we’ve been working closely with our clients as well as prospects to release a whole host of AI enhanced features. And there’s two features to be specific, there’s a smart automation, which is used to, I suppose, automate the entire document without having to drag and highlight text for instance, what you do instead is to press a button, and the AI technology and logic reading technology behind it will be able to prepare a template for you within seconds. And as on top of that what we can then do is to generalize and templatized your live deal documents into a ready made template as well. So you’ll be able to push three new use cases within a matter of hours on compared to other document automation market dog technology in the market. Another feature that we’ve released on top of that is smart consolidation. So that adds on the ability for you to combine different variants of mutually exclusive documents into a single master template. So all you have to do say for instance, to hire someone in the UK for a part time agreement is to simply select UK employment part time agreement then that will bring you the relevant clauses, the relevant wordings that’s associated with that specific variant of the document.
Kate Boyd 5:06
Very exciting. Giles, I know you, you gave me some, some previews of some of those episodes. I’d love to see here. Because I was like, I gotta see this war. Go ahead. And I know you want to add on a little bit pair. Yes.
Giles Thompson 5:20
I mean, yeah, I was think I was looking quite keen there. I think I think really the the main reason we’ve done this is not because all of these Large Language Models have come on leaps and bounds in the last year or so we I guess, we aren’t looking for a use case for those technologies. One of the things that Kate, you know, better than most, and indeed you do to Greg, actually, is that the key thing with any legal tech project is actually getting it going. But one of the things that we’ve struggled with, to be honest, in terms of scaling, and we’re not unique as a document automation platform is actually taking a really complex legal template, often, it’s not a template that’s even finished, it might just be a prior deal document or something quite messy, and maybe even with errors, and then turning that into a template. So actually, it’s quite involved implementation as far as legal tech project product implementations go. And it involves playing with the core intellectual property that a lot of lawyers are super, super precious about for really good reason, and not least liability. So yeah, this whole use case is basically about making that process easier to get started. And really lowering that that barrier to entry. Often we hear, you know, can we have one of your templates for an automation demo? And they say, We don’t have templates. And then the conversation hasn’t really gotten forgotten that that’s actually a lot more pervasive, I would say, in the US. I was in in the UK, they’ve had a probably a slightly more long established tradition of creating centralized templates and centralized practice area by practice area, km function. In the US, they’re probably a little bit more scant. There are really notable exception exceptions on those templates. So actually, it’s been a really key thing for us, in working with us clients. And I imagine that’s, that’s hopefully reflective of what some of you have seen.
Greg Lambert 7:09
Yeah, I think you’re spot on, on the differences between the knowledge management in the US and the knowledge management in the UK and EU, we’ve said it on the show before, the much more of a technology here in the US. And it’s much more of a human centric design in the UK, in Europe. And so I imagine that it’s very common for you to go to a US law firm and not have a template. So is one of the big values right up front there is helping them understand in what it means to set up a template.
Giles Thompson 7:42
Yeah, absolutely. And the thing that I always say, and it’s kind of a bummer to have to break it to people is, we can make the technology bit really easy. But actually, they’re thinking through the temperature and the work. But also the other point is, it always amazes me because lawyers know it’s really hard. Because if it was wasn’t really hard, but didn’t require someone with experience, then they wouldn’t be doing it. So when people have that epiphany, which doesn’t take very long, because they’re all smart people, then then then it’s absolutely fine. But yeah, I think the other thing as well is one of the big promises of platforms like ours. And I think this is kind of a trend in all legal tech is the promise of democratization. So overworked and frankly, slightly depressed innovation and knowledge teams, like the idea of lawyers being able to self serve. And really document automation historically has not really delivered on that. Our hope is that for fairly simple legal contracts that actually this technology means that lawyers will be able to actually self serve or particular types of lawyers. Well, in terms of actually taking a template thinking, who I don’t want, just want to do a mail merge here. I could I could do an EVOC or automation. But again, we’re quite early on in that journey. And at the moment, it’s the people using it are those that understand that these generative AI enhanced tools aren’t all there yet.
Greg Lambert 9:05
So Giles, I noticed that Avvoka has expanded the client base quite significantly. Do you mind telling us about the strategies that you’ve used to engage new clients and in industries and I imagine there’s some future markets that you’re targeting for expansion as well?
Giles Thompson 9:25
Yeah, totally. No problem at all. So I think I mean, one thing, which I’ll just address at the top is working with excellent partners. So yeah, we were I won’t mention the name of the firm, but when we were quite new to the US market we work with, with Sente with a firm that they had and a lot of those hard bits that we’re talking about, and that consultation and the questions that the client didn’t think to ask was was done by Sente. So that was really helpful for us and actually, you know, it’s it’s quite a referral based and go to market strategy that we do. So that was that took on a lot more significance than just that client. So doing a really good job and doing service in a way that doesn’t scale that’s very sort of service focused, not technology focused. So that ultimately we get those referrals. And then we we can scale, the US has been a really big market for us we felt like about two and a half years ago, was a bit of a tipping point in the US, in terms of people being open to cloud technologies, in terms of people actually starting to feel. I mean, it’s a slight speculation, fee pressure. So we saw a real kind of uptake of document automation technologies. There’s not that much Greenfield in the top, you know, large UK firms, but there was a bit more Greenfield in the US. And we’re quite lucky in that regard. Now, we’ve been able to double down on that. One of the things we’re doing is doing a lot more visits as well. So we’re making sure that we’re getting around Miami, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, New York, California this year. The other thing as well is a real focus on use cases. So speaking to clients about what they want, and really openly and I think we have quite a maybe you’ve got this trip are viable already. But we’re fairly radically honest with with our clients. So understanding what they want, and building some fairly nice stuff for them. Yes, I think that that’s key. And I guess another thing finally would be looking not just at traditional ROI. So when people hear about document automation, they think about doing contracts faster. Now, a lot of people listening are thinking, Well, yeah, I’ll make less money. And hey, my business model works very well, thank you have a look at my drawings. So what we actually started looking at his ROI in the form of, of course, you know, human happiness, but also mitigating regulatory risk. We’ve had various use cases where there’s a risk of it saying, the IRS will come after you as a law firm, if you make a tiny mistake on behalf of a client, where they’re sort of filings for listed companies that need to be made that kind of thing, especially where the end client involved is actually a is a member of a board or one of those listed companies, for example. So that’s been really helpful, because lawyers actually do by risk mitigation as a product, and also working in you know, increasingly using API’s because everybody knows, and again, this is where Sente often come in the world is becoming increasingly connected from a cloud solution perspective. And and Greg has basically been your whole year in terms of what you’ve been doing with with Gen AI ai as well.
Greg Lambert 12:23
That is so true. Well, Kate, since Sente, was was mentioned a couple of times, do you want to talk about the role that you take at Sente to help Avvoka and other startups like this?
Kate Boyd 12:34
Sure. So in that particular case, our client was the law firm, who was trying to evaluate and make decisions about their their data document automation solution, on a very large scale with some pretty complex requirements. We did a full matrix of comparisons kind of across the ecosystem. And Avvoka came out there were I think, the story that we often like to tell us, there were a few really key thing is it was early in the Vocus journey. There were some key things that because of the scale of this client, we needed Avvoka to be able to do, and it was coming up on the Christmas holidays. And Avvoka said, No, we you know, give us two weeks, we’re gonna have that built into the platform. And we’ll show it to you, you know, functional, when, as soon as everyone’s back from New Year’s, and it was kind of this contract was contingent on that functionality being included. And we were super impressed that it was I think it was a busy Christmas for everyone. But the client was happy. And the solution, they’ve continued to really build on it and do some some very, very interesting things. So now we we credit them a lot. I want to I want to come to Giles, as mentioned on the road trip, and we’re kind of going around the states. But before I do jazz, a lot of what you’ve spoken about is really the law firm kind of view. Are you is your client based primarily law firms? Are you working with a number of corporates in any other parts of the industry?
Giles Thompson 14:00
Yeah, so yeah, absolutely. It is more broad than that. I’m totally bias because I was at a private practice law firms, and sometimes I forget. So yeah, that’s bad for me. And thank you for asking. Yeah, I mean, one of our really key clients is Warner Brothers discovery. We also work with McDonald’s as well, which is cool, as well as booking.com, and a number of others. But I think one of the quite cool things about the likes of particularly Warner is when you think about it, they actually do they are really an IP company, fundamentally. And, you know, IP is protected. I know as a former IP litigator, with lots and lots of contracts and other arrangements. So they’re doing some pretty sophisticated things in terms of, you know, commissioning films, TV shows, and there’s a million types of different media that they’re licensing out. So one of the key things we do for them is where they’re looking to generate revenue from those assets and in increasing breadth of different ways those assets can be commercialized. Most often a lot of it quite novel and cutting edge. Our platform is what drives them. So yeah, absolutely. And it’s quite fun to think that, you know, in the past, we’ve been the platform of use for signing new contracts to sell beers to pubs, or to order, you know, potatoes, which by the way, my dad sells as a farmer anyway. Or fries at McDonald’s.
Kate Boyd 15:21
So he really did mean it about granny meetings that understand. Yeah, exactly. Band as they were, let’s jump in on this road trip, because I’m super excited that Jen, can you tell us a little, we’re big fans of tech agnostic, anything. And one of the really awesome things that I know happened here in New York in January is your tech agnostic community events and bringing people together. So Jen, I’m gonna pass to you to fill us in.
Jun Choi 15:50
Yeah, so it’s a separate brand that we have called logic you draft and And essentially, what what this is, is it’s a vendor agnostic platform for all geeks about document automation, whether you’re new to it, or a 10 year veteran to it, you’re invited to speak on it and also attend and it’s essentially a safe space for you to share your war stories about the projects that you have ongoing and you know, just share insights into any tips and insights that you could get, you could benefit for your law firms in house teams as well. So we’ve, we’ve gotten quite a bit of traction across the world, like you say we have, we’ve had it in London, in New York, we’ve recently had it in Sydney, and also San Francisco as well. So we have what’s called at US summer series coming up soon. So we’re going to be having one in Houston and Chicago, which is going to be really exciting and engaging with the club crowd globally. We did have speakers from you know, I manage to Troutman pepper EY, Morgan Lewis, all the big names, come and speak on it. So it’s a really safe space for anyone interested in document automation. And it’s free for all essentially,
Kate Boyd 16:59
I love this safe space. It’s like equal parts, therapy and technology geeking out.
Jun Choi 17:07
Exactly. And we find that out lots of the speakers and also the audience’s bond over their stories about document automation. So it’s, it’s really nice to see people in an area,
Kate Boyd 17:19
lay on the couch and tell me about your document.
Greg Lambert 17:22
And nothing, nothing is better to pull people together than a shared trauma, right? Or story about building that template. Giles, did you have anything to add to that?
Giles Thompson 17:38
Yeah, I mean, what I would say is, I think I find the first bit of those sessions is, is basically the confirmation that you’re not going mad that everybody else is having all of the same problems, and you get yourself into a bit of a tears, you might learn something about how you how you’re going to improve. But ultimately, the thing that really I like about it is if you’ve been ahead of knowledge, you’ve been ahead of innovation, you’ve been a consultant working across multiple businesses, you actually truly understand the value and the subject matter expertise that these individuals have some of these individuals been working in document automation, you know, probably longer than John’s been alive. And you learn a lot when you’re doing that. So yeah, just championing those skills, connecting with those people. And frankly, us learning a little bit about the stuff we we haven’t thought about is really important. You know, I think one of the things that was a bit of a frustration people had Is it super excited about Gen AI, but actually people were saying, Oh, can I ask the Gen AI ai chatbot to drop me a perfect commercial lease agreement? And I think that they’re thinking, Well, I’ve been kind of trying to sell you almost this exact thing for years and years, and you didn’t engage with me. And look, there’s no shortcuts, or there’s some shortcuts. But you know, they’re not actually shorter than the method I already sent you safe and quite nice to again, do a bit of crystal ball gazing during those sessions.
Greg Lambert 19:03
Yeah, well, we’ll keep that crystal ball handy, because we’re going to ask you that question later. So Giles, besides the logically drafted series that you guys are doing across the US and other countries, you know, what are some of the key projects that you get in development there to VOCA say over the next year, and kind of what do you see your long term vision there being?
Giles Thompson 19:27
Gosh, I think, you know, a lot of it is the AI side of things, but I think one of the elements and this is gonna get a little bit techie, this is definitely sort of Wizkid nephew level. Is, is actually around close containerization and so, you know, Word and a lot of other tools out there aren’t great at being able to be interrogated by software. So, you know, fundamentally in Knowing where a clause is within a document, where it begins where it ends, and indeed, what metadata or tagging or information is associated with that part, you know, word, for example, is fundamentally a word processing tool. It’s not a contracting tool, and it segmented off the word, taxonomy. It’s not meant to be that. So what we’re doing is because we have a proprietary editor, and in HTML, we can actually start to dice up and label different clauses natively. Now, why is that important? Well, we think it’s super, super important for things like reporting. And we’ve been doing that in the past and tracking clause amendments, tracking the instances of clauses for review ability later down the line, if we ever need to sort of look at investigate change contracts. But actually, the really important thing is to augment these new approaches to AI. So everybody on this call, be familiar with with Wragge approaches towards improving the results that you get from using these new technologies. And, you know, being able to segment and understand what is in your contract in a little bit more detail is really helpful for that kind of, I’m going to use the word augmentation, because I’ll just end up using the wrong word and improving the results that you get, you know, when applying these various different use cases, whether that be automatically creating your templates using our technology, or whether that be saying For example, you know, I’m speculating here, downloading a document from a vaca. And then using a tool like Microsoft co pilot on it. So actually, you know, co pilot will work better, for example, in theory, where it understands the structure within that contract, you know, by 100%, from the outset. So it’s, it sounds kind of boring, in unless you’re in this area, but actually, it could be pretty innovative. The other thing, which is kind of related to that is a lot of these technologies. Basically strip the documents that you’re working with, with cross referencing, and with how styles and that kind of thing. So actually, we’ve got quite a cool HTML editor, which can be integrated with those tools, but can also preserve things like cross references, how styles etc, which, again, sounds pretty dull if you’re not in the space. But actually, a lot of the problem that we find people are having is they can use these tools, but then what they get out is kind of garbage from, from a legal perspective, for subsequent amends, and also for presenting to a client. So I’m doing all the AI stuff in the building blocks grow.
Greg Lambert 22:39
Since you mentioned co pilot and the fact that Microsoft Word is still a word processing program and not a contract automation program. Do you think we’re going to kind of have the same type of issue that we had with generative AI when it comes to copilot in that? They think, oh, well, it’s got copilot now. So that does make this a, you know, a contract automation program? Do you think there’s going to be some over expectations on what copilot out by itself can do?
Giles Thompson 23:13
I think definitely, I think the first thing I want to say just for answering is I’m totally not a bear on this technology. I think it’s absolutely amazing. But it’s you know, it’s totally got its place. I mean, I take a step back off. And and I think well, what’s the point of contracting? You know, fundamentally, what’s the point? The point is for the lawyers to do as little as possible, right, and to let the people who’ve made a commercial agreement, actually just agree and do as little back and forth, is to have people understand each other and formalize that agreement. Now, for a lot of contractual negotiations. That means that actually coming up with something fundamentally unique, I guess, or off the cuff, let’s say, is totally unhelpful, actually familiarity. And having seen a particular type of vision in the past, and you know, even having one from, you know, a defined list. So for example, we work with the loan Market Association, and we have a product called loan, LMA automate with them. And they have, you know, recommended forms, and there’s basically a market norm of the various different strengths of provisions that you might have in your loan facility. And that works really well it speeds up those transactions. So I think the impact that it will have purely from that perspective, basically, because of what the goal of contracting is, will probably be relatively limited. However, when it comes to novel clauses, I do think it’s definitely going to, I think of it more of document assembly, rather than document automation. So your document automation, the building blocks, your contract, I think will largely be the same. There’s only so many different permutations you can have in terms of a lot of that boilerplate that may get you at night on the way there, but the assembly will be really interesting in terms of making those bespoke amendments. I do definitely see that. But I do think you’re going to want courses Gonna be, for lack of a better word verification, and ways of kind of improving the veracity of the responses that you’re getting from a tool like that. But ultimately, as a lawyer, at least, I’d always want to see context, I’d want to actually be able to understand the red line versus my stock playbook or have different clauses. So I can look how off peacetime going, you know, what I used to do as a trainee lawyer was I just looked at the smarter, more experienced lawyers and see how different what I done was from them, or, you know, the classic is take that that provision and then mark it up. So I think I’ve I’ve kind of covered covered it all off there, hopefully.
Kate Boyd 25:37
I would jump in. You know, I think the concerns about generative AI, being being a part of this new technology are one really important thing for listeners to be thinking about. But I think security and control of client data is also something that we hear a lot, I know, every prime everyone on this call, talks and thinks about a lot. What is Avvoka doing now to make sure that that your current platform you mentioned containerization? So as the platform moves ahead, what are some of the things that you’re doing to ensure to kind of client data security and other security standards?
Giles Thompson 26:15
Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, ISO 27001, you know, obviously, SOC2,, you know, equivalent. So, absolutely fundamental starting point. Like, I don’t think anyone necessarily has the right approach, I think we, we’ve seen with the whole cloud debate, that often this stuff is kind of horses for courses. So you know, is on prem safer is cloud safer, I’m not qualified to tell you, but we’re often able to be fairly flexible on that. And we’ve kind of taken that same ethos, when it comes to these Large Language Models. One of the things we’ve been most keen to do is actually to collaborate with our clients. So we’ve built for lack of a better metaphor, we’ve built the car. Okay, and the LLM is the engine. And what we’ve said is, well, you know, clients will sell you, that car will sell you all of the gears and the nuts and the bolts, you recommend a new bring the engine? So what we’ve seen with a lot of clients is they wanted to use ChatGPT. And they want to have, you know, their own as your hosted instance, and they want to plug it in. And that’s absolutely fine. It does mean you have some limits in terms of what you can do with the prompting. But what it does do is it does sort of future proof for us. But to answer your actual question, it does mean that they can get a little bit more comfortable with that risk, because ultimately, with regard to that stuff, they stay in control of that, that side of things. And ultimately, I think a lot of people are just taking a view themselves with these types of technologies. And no matter how transparent we are, it’s fairly hard for us to take that view on behalf of every single one of our clients in a blanket way. Because everybody’s looking at it a little bit differently. That may change. But again, as I kind of alluded to already, we’re kind of making that divorce the case, because we’re a little bit worried about we don’t know who’s going to win this and everything’s changing so fast. It may even be the client stopped blogging and multiple, or it just becomes a commercial decision, as well.
Greg Lambert 28:14
Well, now we’ve reached the time where I need you guys to bring back the crystal ball and in pure into it. And I want to kind of both of your perspectives on what do you think are some changes or challenges that you’ll face at Avvoka Over the next couple of years? And also for the for the industry? What do you think there’s some things that we should be aware of?
Giles Thompson 28:39
I might jump in first. So I think I hope I haven’t taken yours. I think a really key one will be dealing with the classic Gartner trough of disillusionment, one of the things that we’ve seen in the last 18 months was document automation budgets cut, and then replaced with larger generative AI budgets. Now generative AI is I don’t need to tell you is more than just chatbots. So what people have quite quickly realized is actually their use cases for generative AI. Fundamentally, this the same things as they were doing before just slightly better. So what we’re noticing actually is people are coming back to the likes of document automation, and they’re wanting a generative AI enhanced version of it, or they’re spending their money on, you know, iManage, and they’re wanting a generative AI, enhanced version of it. So I think that trough of disillusionment when it comes to the actual technology, but then actually, one of the big ones is they will get back to the same place that they were before and as if as vendors unless we’re very realistic about what we can achieve by leveraging these technologies, and we’re honest about the fact there will be manual work. There we’ll be checking there will be filling in those gaps. You know, we risked being in two years time in a position where actually we didn’t ride that wave and we frustrated people even more in maybe I guess there’s the fourth or fifth wave of potentially looking to make a lot of these technologies mainstream. So I think that’s a big challenge. And And honestly, I’m not that hopeful given some of the research that’s come out recently. And the reaction to that research, I think you probably know what I’m alluding to.
Greg Lambert 30:17
I may have a clue. And in June, what do you see in your crystal ball?
Jun Choi 30:22
Yeah, no, I mean, I think I’m, I’m definitely in agreement with Giles, when it comes to the discussions around AI. You know, it’s this debate where, you know, with AI, completely replaced document automation. And everyone has the rights and views to this topic, but the way I see it, and especially with a walker, and the path we’re taking with smart automation and smart consolidation that I’ve introduced, at the beginning of this podcast is for for document automation to work alongside AI, as opposed to wholly replacing the actual platform. You know, generative AI is a big topic among law firms, not just here in the UK, but also in the US. And it’s definitely going to be interesting to see what kind of use cases and products appear with that wave. But I agree with Charles’s point about, you know, matching document automation, including a vaca with AI technologies, and essentially putting the the the, the ROI is the values you get out of document automation at the core of what we have to offer to our clients.
Kate Boyd 31:28
So what I’m hearing is you’ve got combination of the document automation tool, that’s going to make sure that we’re not imagining things. So the smart features starting to bring in some of that technology with the security. And then you’ve got the community events that will help us deal with all of our trauma as we fall into the trap. You guys, I think you guys are future proof. The business plan is there.
Giles Thompson 31:53
We try our best to start charging for the therapy. I think that’s the way
Kate Boyd 31:59
Yeah, you may not want that to be a free event for
Greg Lambert 32:03
The first one is free. The follow ups are where they get you.
Kate Boyd 32:07
Yeah, it’ll start be like, it’s gonna become the Gen AI ai budget, carve out.
Giles Thompson 32:14
We’re doctors, and we’re Big Pharma.
Kate Boyd 32:20
All all of us today. Well, thank you so much for coming to The Geek in Review today and talking with us before I start to close out, Greg, anything else you want to add?
Greg Lambert 32:31
No, that’s that’s it. So Giles in John, thank you very much for talking with us today.
Jun Choi 32:38
Thanks for having us.
Giles Thompson 32:39
Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, it was a real pleasure.
Greg Lambert 32:42
And of course, thanks to all of you, the listeners for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, please share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So you can reach out to us on social media. I can be reached primarily on LinkedIn at Greg Lambert. Kate, how about you?
Kate Boyd 33:02
I am also on LinkedIn. I’m one of many Kate Boyd’s, but I’m the one at Sente Advisors.
Greg Lambert 33:07
She told me she was THE Kate Boyd.
Kate Boyd 33:13
You won’t find me under that. A lot of us Giles and Jun where can listeners find more about Avvoka yourselves and illogically drafted events?
Jun Choi 33:27
So with Avvoka you know, you could search avvoka.com And same with logically drafted it’s logically drafted.com. I’m sure you’ll be able to find Giles Thompson and Jun Choi on LinkedIn as well. So we’re happy to help if you have any queries about the event, but also just document automation more broadly.
Greg Lambert 33:43
Great. Yeah. And as I said in his Oh, sorry, go ahead, Giles. You
Giles Thompson 33:47
no problem until I was just saying thanks, Jun.
Greg Lambert 33:51
All right. And so thanks again guys. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. So thank you, Jerry and thanks everyone.