This week on The Geek in Review, Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer sit down to compare notes from a busy conference season. Marlene shares her experience at the American Legal Technology Awards where The Geek in Review was honored for excellence in journalism. She recounts the surreal joy of being recognized among friends and peers in legal tech, including fellow nominees like Steve Embry, and how a spontaneous speech turned out to be one of the night’s highlights. The duo reflects on how events like this underscore the sense of community that continues to define the innovation side of the legal industry.
Greg takes listeners behind the scenes at ClioCon, describing it as one of the most energetic user conferences around. He dives into his conversation with Clio CEO Jack Newton and how the company’s recent vLex acquisition signals a bold expansion into the Big Law space. With $900 million in funding, Clio appears ready to bridge the divide between small-firm technology and enterprise-level workflows. Greg also teases an illuminating hallway chat with Ed Walters, now at Clio Library (formerly vLex/Fastcase), about the major leap forward in legal research accuracy driven by improvements in RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and vector database indexing.
Marlene offers her own takeaways from the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Annual Meeting, where AI and governance dominated the agenda. She describes a landscape where in-house lawyers are wrestling with both the promise and peril of generative AI, from shadow AI concerns to data hygiene challenges. Her biggest surprise was seeing law firms themselves exhibiting at the ACC conference, signaling a shift toward direct engagement between firms and their corporate clients in shared learning spaces.
Together, Greg and Marlene unpack the emerging themes of human-centered governance, the evolving role of AI in matter management, and the race among vendors to automate core workflows without losing the human touch. From Clio’s plans to build AI-driven workflow mapping that could auto-draft documents, to Marlene’s caution about how bespoke law firm processes might resist one-size-fits-all automation, their discussion paints a picture of a profession both accelerating and self-checking at once.
The episode winds down with lighter reflections on travel mishaps, conference after-parties, and the long arc of Richard Susskind’s The End of Lawyers? conversation—still ongoing, now infused with cautious optimism about AI’s role in expanding access to justice. As always, they end where The Geek in Review thrives: at the intersection of humor, humility, and the hopeful chaos of legal innovation.
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[Special Thanks to Legal Technology Hub for their sponsoring this episode.]
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript:
Greg Lambert (00:00)
Everyone I’m Greg Lambert with the Geek in Review and I am here with Cheryl Wilson-Griffin, CWG from LTH and Cheryl you’re going to talk to us a little bit about the ChatGPT being
Cheryl Wilson Griffin (00:16)
Yes, I’m going to tell you about an interesting and terrifying exposure that has the potential to impact each and every one of us, both personally and professionally. Last month, the world was made aware that at least 110,000 full ChatGPT conversations were made public on the web, crawled by Google, and permanently recorded into the internet archive due to a simple checkbox and ChatGPT Of course, much would well was exposed for silly chats like Dungeons and Dragons plans.
and questions about monetary policy, but some exposures hit way closer to home. One of the worst examples was from a legal perspective, was a chat conversation that included some really specific prompt telling us that it’s a conversation with a lawyer in Austin whose client is a multinational energy company who wants to buy land in the Amazon rainforest from indigenous people who have rights to the land. Now it’s bad enough that it contains enough identifiable information that the
Internet has already figured out who the lawyer is and who the client is. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that this particular conversation history also included the lawyer explaining that the indigenous people don’t know the value of land and then requesting a strategy from ChatGPT to exploit this to get the land for the lowest price possible. And even if the multinational company was totally on board with the plan, they certainly didn’t want that published for the entire world to see.
we have entered the era of searchable malpractice. If you want to learn more about what happened, how it happened, and what to do about it, check out our recent article on Legal Tech Hub called ChatGPT Damage Control and Future Proofing on legaltechnologyhub.com
Greg Lambert (01:59)
I’m glad it was just my D &D prompt that got surfaced on this one. All right.
Cheryl Wilson Griffin (02:04)
Exactly. There
were some good ones, though.
Greg Lambert (02:07)
Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Cheryl.
Marlene Gebauer (02:17)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focus on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gabauer.
Greg Lambert (02:24)
And I’m Greg Lambert and today we thought we would just kind of catch up on a few things that.
Marlene Gebauer (02:29)
Greg warned me all about getting the glass table.
Greg Lambert (02:34)
I’m gonna put my hand behind my back. We’re gonna catch up. We both went to a couple of conferences lately. I went to ClioCon and you went to ACC. Well, and one more thing, while I was at ClioCon, you were actually in Boston as well. That’s true. For a different reason. Do you want to tell the listeners what?
Marlene Gebauer (02:54)
Well, ⁓ I was recognized and the podcast was recognized ⁓ for the American Legal Technology Awards in journalism. So I had the distinct pleasure of ⁓ attending the award ceremony at Suffolk Law School and ⁓ it was great. It was absolutely fabulous. We had such a great time. No, I did not have a speech prepared and it’s funny, I spoke with our
Greg Lambert (03:15)
Did you have a speech prepared?
Marlene Gebauer (03:23)
one of our friends from the podcast and said, you know, did people make speeches here? Like, I don’t know how this works. And she’s like, nah, they don’t really make speeches. And then of course the first group, the first person went up and made a speech. like, dear. So.
Greg Lambert (03:40)
I… ⁓
Marlene Gebauer (03:43)
And then you follow
them. I put something together and apparently it sounded good because I got a couple of compliments on it.
Greg Lambert (03:50)
Well done. Well Well congratulations. Well deserved. I got to go to the after party and everyone was really happy. And of course, you you had some really good competition as well.
Marlene Gebauer (03:53)
Thank you.
That’s true.
Steve Embry, who we’ve had on the podcast before, ⁓ was part of my competition. ⁓ But again, we’re all friends. And the thing is, everybody actually gets an award. So it’s just a different type of award.
Greg Lambert (04:23)
Sounds good, sounds like a lot of fun. I know the after party was fun, so.
Marlene Gebauer (04:27)
The after party was fine.
so I’ve never been to ClioCon before and I think this was your first time.
Greg Lambert (04:34)
I went to the online one in like 2020. Yeah, the COVID one. It’s really interesting because it’s one, it’s a conference around a product, which is interesting. One product. It’s one product. It’s got lots of, you know, plugins to it. but yeah, so it was really interesting. Jack Newton, ⁓ the founder and CEO, ⁓ very
Marlene Gebauer (04:37)
Like the COVID one.
And one
Modules,
Greg Lambert (05:05)
energetic, ⁓ kicked it off. It’s a high energy conference with lots of really good ⁓ programs, but it’s just a good audience. It’s kind of strange because the people that are there are really there because they want to learn more about the product, how to use it better. They’re customers. Yeah, they’re customers.
Marlene Gebauer (05:28)
Or
perspective customers. Yeah, it’s funny. Jack was actually at the award ceremony and, ⁓ you know, I believe one of the he was up for one of the presentation. He was a presenter, I think. And, you he basically got up there and was like, you know, OK, you know, there’s there’s an after there’s an after party. But, you know, Glee OCon starts at nine tomorrow. Yes. He was like, all right, guys, you still got to show up.
Greg Lambert (05:49)
It was interesting because the after party was sponsored by 8 a.m. and then Jack kept saying, but you don’t have to be at the ClioCon until 9 a.m.
Marlene Gebauer (05:58)
Very cute.
Greg Lambert (05:59)
Very cute. ⁓ Yeah, well, the reason that I went to Clio Con was because I was invited ⁓ actually by one of our former guests, recent guest, Anusia Gillespie, ⁓ because of the vLex Clio ⁓ acquisition, which I think is they were waiting, I think on some European, ⁓ I think it was Spain to sign off on it.
I think they’ve cleared all the hurdles except for that. That’s supposed to be clearing any day now. But they’ve got lots of plans going on and they wanted to share those, not just with their typical customers, which typically are small, solo firms, they’ve got $900 million to play with now with funding and they’re really taking a big swing at Big Law.
Give us a little introduction to the product.
Marlene Gebauer (06:55)
Yeah, it’s very interesting and ⁓ I’m hoping to hear more about that roadmap in terms of the direction that they’re going.
Greg Lambert (07:04)
So tell us about ACC, how does it set up?
Marlene Gebauer (07:08)
So ACC is basically the association of corporate council and you have thousands of corporate council from all over the country and world ⁓ coming to this conference. it’s a trade show and people are coming to learn more about the topics that are presented. There’s CLE offered, so if you’re an attorney, as most of the attendees are, that’s a big draw and it’s terrific.
And ⁓ then you also have sort of the vendor, the vendor space. So you have the exhibit hall, just similar to many conferences most of us have gone to. And the one thing that was interesting to me, and again, like my first time going to this, so firms have booths. So it’s not, when you think about it, it makes sense, right? But it caught me off guard because there were a number of firms, and mean, these are firms that you know.
And they had booths there and so they had attorneys there, they had marketing people there. ⁓ for me it was a little surreal because I was just not used to that. ⁓
Greg Lambert (08:17)
Were they mostly big law firms or were they boutiques?
Marlene Gebauer (08:20)
From what I
could tell, was mostly bigger law firms that were there. you had a lot of governance vendors. ⁓ Thomson Reuters was there, had a very big presence. I had a good time walking the exhibit hall, just sort of seeing it, because it was very different than what I was used to. Lots of good swag.
Greg Lambert (08:41)
Interesting. ⁓
Yeah, so I guess if you were to compare what we were doing, the two types, ⁓ how do they compare, do you think?
Marlene Gebauer (08:58)
Well, I guess, mean, just sort of understanding what I understand about ClioCon, you know, it’s, know, focused on a specific client set. It’s sort of tech, I think, you can tell me if I’m wrong, but it’s like tech, you know, tech forward. And ⁓ I think the ACC is much more, and again, this is just my experience and I missed the first, I missed the first.
I missed Monday because my flights got all screwed up. So take this with, take it with a grain of salt. But there was a lot of focus on governance, regulatory, because again, I mean, these are all in-house counsel and that’s a lot of what their job was. But saying that, lots of the presentations were about AI and generative AI.
and what people need to know about generative AI and how to protect against improper use of generative AI. So lots and lots of AI.
Greg Lambert (10:04)
Was there any complaining about their outside counsel?
Marlene Gebauer (10:08)
You know, I did not hear any complaining about outside counsel. ⁓ What was interesting to me is, again, and I’m, you I have a different type of role and I only heard one panel very briefly kind of go over how not just an information governance policy, but like you have to have a data governance policy. Like you have to have, you know, data hygiene and data cleanup in order to make
you know, your AI work well. So, ⁓ they were talking about internally and that was the thing, I didn’t hear a whole lot of focus on how they are in a position to help their organizations use.
Greg Lambert (10:41)
Were they talking about internally or were they?
Marlene Gebauer (10:59)
these tools safely and effectively. you know, to make things as easy as possible, you know, with all the while making sure that the proper protections are in place. The other thing that I didn’t, you you talked about outside council. I didn’t really hear much discussion about outside council at all, but I only went to the AI programs. that was one of the things I was there to speak. And I was speaking about AI disruption on a panel and, you know, with two ⁓ in-house council, one consultant, our friend.
Sajju George and.
I started talking about that there’s a partnership here. There’s an ability to reach out to your panel firms and your outside council because they have lots of people in this space, an innovation space or a knowledge management space or data science. And they have a lot of this experience. They have a lot of this knowledge. So tap into that if you can. ⁓
I know the groups were, they were very hungry for examples as I think most, most audiences are. And they were also, ⁓ they were also very interested in, in benchmarking. And, and I remember I was sitting in one panel and they’re like, there’s really no benchmarking. was like, there really is benchmarking and you know, things like vows and I think it’s legal, think legal benchmarking. I forget that they just came out in September with an evaluation. So,
I was telling about a few of those things. actually ⁓ referred them to Bob Ambrosi’s summary of Jack Newton’s opening and where he was talking about a day in the life of a lawyer and all the different examples that, because I looked at that and I realized that was all Clio, but I’ve also seen other tools that do those things too.
Greg Lambert (12:51)
Yeah, I think on the benchmarking, Chad Maine’s podcast in the last couple of weeks has talked about the afforded debt to me.
Marlene Gebauer (12:57)
That’s where
we should have that individual on the podcast.
Greg Lambert (13:04)
⁓
So what was your big takeaway from it? Not takeaway, what was kind of the aha moment that maybe caught you off guard or something made you think?
Marlene Gebauer (13:17)
I think, like my aha moment was that.
There’s plenty of opportunity for law firms to go and showcase what they’re doing in this technology space and how it’s benefiting the clients. mean, you have this…
You have this sort of in captured group that is basically all the people that you want to talk to and they’re all there. So take advantage of that. How about you?
Greg Lambert (13:53)
⁓ so for me, I mean, there was a ⁓ ton of information, ⁓ Jack Newton’s keynote. I was sitting next to Bob Ambrogi and I would lean over as he would go and one more thing, one more thing, ⁓ many, many, one more things. And I just leaned over and I was like, my God, this is too much. This is just too much. ⁓ but it’s, it’s amazing. Kind of the.
Marlene Gebauer (14:16)
My head’s gonna explode.
Greg Lambert (14:21)
you know, the attitude that Clio has as far as, you know, taking the technology by the horns and just kind of riding it and really trying new things, going and swinging big. ⁓ And so it was interesting. That didn’t really surprise me because I’ve heard Jack Newton talk before and he’s, you know, quite charismatic. ⁓ The thing that I think probably,
I walked away with and I thought the longest on actually didn’t even occur and it occurred in the hallway. And I had a conversation with Ed Walters from vLex which is now rebranded as Clio library. ⁓ But Ed and I had a conversation and I really was asking him because of something that I think we both have seen.
Marlene Gebauer (15:08)
Yes, I’ve heard this.
Greg Lambert (15:20)
with the legal research products over the past five or six months. And that is a substantial improvement in output. And I have seen just, you know, for a couple of years, it was bad. results were bad. ⁓
Marlene Gebauer (15:42)
you’re just like I’m just not gonna use this because I don’t trust that I’ll catch it.
Greg Lambert (15:46)
I think they were just darn lucky in the fact that a lot of attorneys had a very long runway of forgiveness ⁓ because I think everyone thought this was going to improve and you know the old saying of this is the worst it will ever be. But I mean a few months ago I just started seeing significant improvements and so I was asking Ed about this and kind of what his thoughts were ⁓ behind it.
And I think the conversation started with, it because the LLMs are better, that there’s a reasoning models now that they’re able to do agentic workflows and this and that. And he was like, yeah, that’s kind of part of it. He says, but really what’s going on is behind the scenes. And that is that the RAG technology and the vector databases have significantly improved. And not only that. Why is that?
⁓ I did some research on this. So, and what he was saying was not only has the technology improved, but the technologists have better understandings on how to work ⁓ with that. And so I actually have, ⁓ I did some research on this, ended up with about 70 pages of very technical jargon of why, ⁓
the improvement has happened. And a lot of it is on how the data in the vector databases is being indexed and it’s being chopped up or chunked, right? So there’s some good improvements on the way that it’s handling the input of information. And then when it comes to actually retrieving, so the RAG,
retrieval, augmented generation. ⁓ And so the retrieval part has improved significantly. And so the old adage of garbage in, garbage out, well, it used to be if you got bad results on that initial pull from the documents from using the RAG ⁓ process, you got bad output because you were dealing with bad data. ⁓
And so now they’re actually working really hard in improving the ability to isolate what is the better data to bring back and augment and then use that to generate the output. And yeah, it’s all about data. But I think it’s kind of an unsung hero.
Marlene Gebauer (18:31)
All about data. All about good data.
Greg Lambert (18:37)
I took that 60 pages of data. sent this to you before you came over today. So I know you didn’t have a chance to read it. I read a little bit. And actually, I think I was inspired a little bit from Anusia Gillespie’s writing. ⁓ And I turned it into like a 10 page story where it’s two people that are talking about it. It’s really like my, if Ed Walters and I had more time.
I think this would have been the conversation that we had. ⁓ you know, it’s those sorts of things, those in the hallway kind of meetings, I think is still to me when it comes to conferences, that’s the absolute best.
Marlene Gebauer (19:18)
Absolutely, it’s the, I mean the sessions are good and I mean the sessions can be good, some are good, some are better than others.
Greg Lambert (19:27)
I an hour I can’t get back from one of the sessions. We won’t talk about that.
Marlene Gebauer (19:36)
But there’s nothing like kind of connecting with people face to face and just sort of having a conversation and you know of people that you respect and who are knowledgeable in the industry and sort of sharing experiences. I think that makes all the difference in life.
Greg Lambert (19:57)
world.
any… Did you answer the aha moment yet? couldn’t remember. That’s right. ⁓ The sessions themselves, I ⁓ did a couple that were really good. ⁓ Joshua Lennon had his kind of the survey that Clio does of all of its ⁓ customers and its data. ⁓
Marlene Gebauer (20:01)
I did answer the aha. It was a marketing aha.
Greg Lambert (20:24)
One of the interesting things that he did, and I thought he was joking when he said this at the beginning of his talk, was he was talking about, we’ve looked through the data, we looked through how you work, and then we also looked at how you think about it. And I was like, okay, where’s this going? They literally had a process where they had customers that had the cap.
Marlene Gebauer (20:50)
They aluminum cap on their head.
Greg Lambert (20:51)
They
had the cap on their head to test their brain waves while they were working. so they did a number of things to see kind of how they were approaching things, what kind of frustrated them, they found joy.
Marlene Gebauer (21:07)
I you were going to say they had something sort of like them Wendy Jepsen’s Let’s Think.
Greg Lambert (21:13)
biometrics of the brain waves as they were conducting their
Marlene Gebauer (21:21)
have to I must know more about that. we ever have Jack on the podcast maybe we can wear the hat.
Greg Lambert (21:23)
So yeah.
We’ll have Jack there and then we’ll have Joshua turning the knobs in the background. could totally see him do that. Any good sessions that you attended? Stuck out?
Marlene Gebauer (21:32)
That ground,
I totally want to do that.
Yeah, one of the, I guess it was a plenary session, they had two women and both were in sports and one is an agent and she represents lots of…
male sports clients and she was sort of talking about her experience and her journey of kind of how she got there and how she got them to basically trust her and come to her and it was quite inspiring.
Greg Lambert (22:26)
Did she jump up and say, me the money?
Marlene Gebauer (22:31)
Maybe. If she did, she didn’t share that.
Greg Lambert (22:33)
So, go back a little bit to the tech and the AI themes, if you want. ⁓ I would say on the Clio front, ⁓ it’s really interesting because this is an industry where not only do law firms chase each other for second place, right?
No one wants to go first, but no one wants to go third. But also I think a lot of the vendors do as well. And so a lot of times when you see big ideas coming out from one vendor, you know the others are taking notes and ready to follow. We used to see that a lot with case text. Case text would come out with something cool. Lexis and Westlaw and Bloomberg and others would come out with the same product.
Marlene Gebauer (23:18)
and everybody in the
Greg Lambert (23:25)
The thing that I think was most interesting and I think was most realistic was using AI in things like intake and not just doing the traditional type of intake where you’re running conflicts and you’re
Marlene Gebauer (23:51)
Gathering data points.
Greg Lambert (23:52)
I
mean that that I think everyone is thinking about how do we use AI? but one of the things that I was hearing that is on the horizon for ⁓ a Clio and others is that once a matter is set up of using AI to then start the Workflow and the process mapping and saying okay. This is this type of case for this you’re going to need
these five documents and instead of just saying you need those five documents of actually starting to draft those five documents and give you something to work with and then put things on your calendar saying, okay, if this has to be filed, here are the dates that you have to get this in by. Here’s your time to follow up. So there’s a lot of almost assistant type process that they were talking about. it up and making it a
⁓ a client matter ⁓ process that starts to kick in as soon as you’ve got the client signed.
Marlene Gebauer (25:01)
I have questions. I have many questions. How did they know the documents to start?
Greg Lambert (25:03)
I don’t know that I can answer it.
A lot of it will be because now they’re tapped into, maybe tapped into your DMS.
Marlene Gebauer (25:15)
Tapped into your DMS, tapped into Outlook.
Greg Lambert (25:17)
tapped into
Outlook, tapped into the courts, tapped into the dockets. ⁓ And not only that, but then they also have secondary resources that have those checklists. ⁓ And based on your jurisdiction, it may come up with a, you know, here are the five things that you need to do to start this process.
Marlene Gebauer (25:38)
It might work. mean, I’m actually sort of working on like some workflows and, and, know, with associated tools and, ⁓ it could work if it’s connected all of that. mean, just everybody has kind of bespoke processes. ⁓ and certainly even, you know, subgroups of practice groups have, have, you know, their own types of processes. So you’d almost have to
I narrow it to like, people in this group normally do X, Y, and Z, and then be able to do it. That’s pretty cool.
Greg Lambert (26:15)
Well, and I think it’s not so well kept secret that when it comes to matter management software, big firms are sorely missing in that area. so, and then, and it’s exactly what Clio I think is looking at is with the Clio operate. I did warn them that naming everything Clio something.
Marlene Gebauer (26:28)
See who is banking on it.
Greg Lambert (26:40)
⁓ is good for branding but can also have some detrimental effects if one piece doesn’t work. It’s not Operate that doesn’t work, it’s Clio that doesn’t work. so I let them know that from previous experience with other companies that have rebranded everything as blank this. ⁓ So, but ⁓ I think with Clio Operate having a matter management software
that’s probably going to be their entry into large firms because that’s not going to be replacing anything. That’s going to be a new process or new product. And I think it’s a lot easier to come in that way, just my own personal experience, than it is to try and say, okay, we’re coming in with a conflict system and we’re going to replace Intapp or whatever.
Marlene Gebauer (27:31)
Here’s an AI tool or something like that. This is different.
Greg Lambert (27:35)
Now whether or not Jack takes my advice…
Marlene Gebauer (27:38)
Yeah, I I, I didn’t get to talk to a whole lot of people. And again, that was because my flights and all of that, but there was a networking lunch where there was a lunch and I got lunch and there were people there, but there wasn’t like no place to sit. So I found this little table around the corner and I sat down and then immediately I had a few people like join me. like, can we sit? So
You know, just in that little microcosm, you know, it tech-forward company, which is a household name, and was talking to their in-house counsel. And then there was another one who was a very tiny company, very niche product that,
helped in extraction of minerals and had very sort of very very niche type of needs in terms of contracts and so it was you just had like the two you know one here one here and I imagine that is probably a good representation of of kind of what was at ACC in terms of ⁓ data in terms of you know tech maturity.
Greg Lambert (28:57)
⁓ or there who’s the keynote did you get to go i didn’t get to
Marlene Gebauer (29:04)
Oh,
you know who it was? No, it wasn’t Bryan Cranston. It was, oh gosh, is it Squawk Box?
Greg Lambert (29:07)
Cranston.
Marlene Gebauer (29:13)
They’re on early in the morning financial.
Greg Lambert (29:15)
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Seems like CNBC or something or MSNBC or.
Marlene Gebauer (29:21)
I
so. can picture him in my mind, but the name is not coming. But ⁓ I know Sajju was in line to get his autograph for the book. So yeah, I miss that completely, unfortunately.
Greg Lambert (29:36)
Yeah, we had a, well, the big wrap-up, of course, was Richard Susskind. And I’ve seen Richard Susskind many, many times. ⁓ now there’s an AI component to the end of lawyers. But I will have to say, I think he was a lot more.
I think optimistic somewhat. What? With the ⁓ AI. I think he sees there’s a lot of opportunity. And of course, his big thing is the way we sell services is not great. And it’s still not great. ⁓ And there’s still hope that we’ll get off the billable hour sometime.
Marlene Gebauer (30:16)
and it’s still not great.
It’s like how long has the end of lawyers been going on? He’s made a good industry out of that. Yeah. How many years?
Greg Lambert (30:31)
Well, it’s
Well, I mean, he started in, I mean, he really kind of took off after the 08 crisis, right? ⁓ In fact, timing was pretty much everything because he’s been around since the 80s. And I don’t think he really got mainstream until after the event and timing really helped on that. ⁓ The, ⁓ I think the one thing that
Marlene Gebauer (30:52)
We had an event.
Greg Lambert (31:03)
he saw was using the AI tools as assistance, as leverage of, even as they get smarter, there’s still a lot of opportunity in the legal field. And there’s so much, know, demand, pent up demand for legal services that go unmet. so, I mean, a lot of it was rehashing things he’s been saying for 40 years.
He did point out that he was talking about artificial intelligence in the 80s. by the way, so he was ahead of the game, I guess. ⁓ But, you know, it’s I think it was a ⁓ nice way to wrap it up, but nothing, I don’t think earth shattering that he brought up. ⁓ The touchy feely part we got was we had ⁓ a keynote that talked about the
20 some odd years he spent in prison for a crime that he didn’t commit. And just talked about the justice system. And it was really interesting because of the audience. The audience being a bunch of lawyers, right? And I think there was some really uncomfortable moments in there when it was talking about how much we believe in a legal system that
doesn’t serve everyone well. I mean, kind of called on people to make a difference. it was ⁓ very, very motivating. But he talked about, well, actually had, his story was on NBC Dateline. And it more or less,
proved that he did not commit this crime and it was like fourteen years later before he got out maybe longer than that.
Marlene Gebauer (32:59)
Was it like, kind of like, was it?
Greg Lambert (33:01)
It
was a murder. It was a murder of a police officer. huh. ⁓ and so the DA in Manhattan where he was convicted, even after the evidence was like, well, we gave you a fair trial. That’s all we, that’s all we owed you. ⁓ so, and again, this is coming from his perspective. We didn’t hear the DA from Manhattan wasn’t there, but you know, I’ve watched enough, law and order. know how to. The truth.
Marlene Gebauer (33:25)
We know.
Greg Lambert (33:31)
Did you have any feely presentations?
Marlene Gebauer (33:34)
There was a wellness presentation, but I did not attend it. I was at another AI one, ⁓ but they did have a wellness one.
⁓ One of the themes that I heard a lot, and again this has to do, it falls nicely into governance and regulatory, ⁓ is sort of balancing human skills and the governance aspect of things. There’s this deep fear that people
aren’t, don’t really understand, you know, when they’re, you know, putting stuff into an LLM, like what’s safe, what’s not, why it’s safe, why it’s not. ⁓ Lots of concerns about shadow AI, which, you know, I definitely took the opportunity to say this is where you are a partner to your organization to make sure that people have the tools.
that they need. then, because if they don’t have them, right, they’ll go someplace else. And we all know that happens. So that, I think, was a ⁓ big theme, along with another one where, again, it was the regulatory and just trying to get a handle on all of the different guidelines and regulations and from all the different jurisdictions and kind of how do you…
Greg Lambert (34:42)
I them though.
Marlene Gebauer (35:09)
How do you manage all that?
Greg Lambert (35:10)
So what did you take away from
Marlene Gebauer (35:14)
from the regulatory one. ⁓
I took away the-
Greg Lambert (35:19)
Was
it you’re doing the things you need to do or are you missing something?
Marlene Gebauer (35:25)
Oh, well, I think it was, I mean, all of these were couched in the making people aware of these things. And I think.
in-house counsel or general counsel have a really tough job in terms of trying to get a handle on all of that because some of them kind of take different positions. Some of them are much more relaxed, others are not. And I don’t know if it’s like where, for CLE like
you just sort of pick the most restrictive state and that’s sort of what you did your CLEs to. I don’t know if you do that, but, even if you do, you know, the stuff changes. It’s changing, changing really rapidly. And so I feel like…
The AI governance policies, mean, that is just a fluid document. That’s not gonna be something that you’re gonna rely on for a year. You’re gonna rely on it for maybe six months, and then you’re gonna have to change it again. I appreciate them. I appreciate them, I really do.
Greg Lambert (36:45)
I can’t imagine, you know, it’s hard enough, you know, trying to do all the governance rules and AI policies for, you know, a thousand or two thousand people. I can’t imagine what it’s like for 50,000, a hundred. All across the world and, you know, 75 jurisdictions and all of that. So, you know, God bless them. Good.
Marlene Gebauer (37:01)
50,000 people all across the world.
Nice.
So.
Greg Lambert (37:13)
Well, we both have TLTF coming up. So that’s going to be interesting. I’m hoping that we can do some recording while we’re there. That would be good. We need more shows, but that’s such a good crowd. So I’m looking forward to doing that. ⁓ Any other things we need to hit? ⁓
Marlene Gebauer (37:23)
That would be good.
No,
I don’t think so. think that’s kind of my last, I mean, I’m not speaking speaking, but I think that’s kind of my last sort of public engagements that I know of before the end of the year. Breather.
Greg Lambert (37:48)
Yeah.
Where were, they say where ACC is next year? ⁓ guess where? Clio. Clio Con. Really? Yeah. Boston is good, but I can tell you what, get your hotel early. Those dang things are expensive.
Marlene Gebauer (37:53)
Boston.
Well, they liked Boston.
Yeah, it is not an inexpensive area, but I know that you kind of went alternative ways to sort of secure where you were staying, and I did the same thing.
Greg Lambert (38:17)
Yeah, my favorite story, first night, first night I’m staying in an Airbnb. It’s got stairs, don’t quite, aren’t exactly… It’s old and I busted my butt the first night, twisted my ankle ⁓ and so I was limping around. if you saw somebody hobbling around, that was me.
Marlene Gebauer (38:26)
It’s Boston, it’s old.
Well, speaking of hobbling, ⁓ so after the award ceremony, I was in heels. it’s like, you know what it is? Like I haven’t worn heels, honestly, like real heels since COVID. And I think, well, my feet reacted. So yes, I did walk home barefoot ⁓ from the party.
Greg Lambert (38:54)
My me either. Yeah.
You
posted a great LinkedIn post about it as well. All right. Well, it’s good catching up. I’d like doing these once or twice a year. again, think the ClioCon was great. Sounded like ACC was great. I’ll probably, depending on how things go, I’ll be back in Boston next year. Oh, in fact, we will.
Marlene Gebauer (39:08)
I did. ⁓
I hear we have a standing invite for ClioCon next year.
Greg Lambert (39:31)
Nice.
Nice. All right. Well, thanks for doing the catch up. Yeah, you too. Want to go through the outro?
Marlene Gebauer (39:37)
⁓ Yes, and thanks to you, our listeners, for taking the time to listen to the Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoyed the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you, so reach out to us on LinkedIn and TikTok.
Greg Lambert (39:49)
And if people want to learn more, you’re here.
Marlene Gebauer (39:53)
Here we are. You know, we’re on LinkedIn.
Greg Lambert (39:57)
All right, and thanks to Jerry David DeCicca for the great music. Thank you, Jerry. his music. Yes.
Marlene Gebauer (40:04)
right.