Ray Brescia joins The Geek in Review this week to unpack a role with peak academia vibes, Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life at Albany Law School. Greg frames the title as “Chief Curator of Smart People Ideas,” and Ray embraces a “player-coach” approach, coaching faculty scholarship, unblocking stalled projects, and connecting peers across disciplines. The throughline is community, research momentum, and a practical view of how ideas move from draft to impact.
The conversation then pivots to the core thesis of Ray’s book, Lawyer 3.0. Ray maps the legal profession across three eras: Lawyer 1.0 as a low-barrier “amorphous bar,” Lawyer 2.0 as the institutional buildout of law schools, bar exams, ethics codes, and modern law firms, and Lawyer 3.0 as the next inflection point driven by technology. Ray ties prior shifts to urbanization, immigration, and industrial-scale commerce, then parallels those forces with today’s generative AI and analytics reshaping research, drafting, discovery, and service delivery.
Ray retells the famous milkshake study, then translates the idea into legal services: clients are not shopping for “a lawyer,” clients are shopping for problem resolution. This reframing pushes law firms to examine intake, scoping, and service design through the lens of client outcomes, business problems, and life problems, not internal practice labels. The milkshake becomes a metaphor for product-market fit in law, with fewer crumbs on the steering wheel.
Ray contrasts “bespoke services” with productized pathways, including a Model T style offering that meets most client needs at lower cost, plus higher-cost custom work when risk or complexity demands. Ray highlights expert-system style workflows such as Citizenshipworks, describing a TurboTax-like experience for straightforward matters, with “red flags” triggering referral to a lawyer. The same logic extends to limited scope representation and “lawyer for the day” programs in high-volume courts, where informed consent, reasonable scope, and “first, do no harm” reduce the chance of clients feeling abandoned midstream.
The final stretch tackles law firm AI adoption, hallucination risk, and professional responsibility. Ray stresses minimum competence: verify cases, verify quotations, verify sources, and treat generative outputs as drafts or starting points, not final work product. The panel discusses guardrails, education, and workflow design for large firms, plus the rising reality of clients arriving with AI-generated “research.” Ray’s crystal ball points toward more commoditized legal services at scale, a latent market of underserved people, and stronger interdisciplinary collaboration between lawyers and technologists so legal education aligns with Lawyer 3.0 realities.
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[Special Thanks to Legal Technology Hub for their sponsoring this episode.]
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript
Marlene Gebauer (00:00)
Hi, I’m Marlene Gebauer from The Geek in Review. I have Stephanie Wilkins from Legal Technology Hub here. Hi, Stephanie. How are you? Good. And you’re going to tell us about updates to Legal Technology Hub’s premium content, right?
Stephanie Wilkins (00:06)
Good, Marlene. How you doing?
Yeah, definitely. We have new and updated premium categories and content on the horizon. If you’re not familiar with it, or you haven’t played around on Legal Tech Hub much, the Legal Tech Hub directory breaks down the available solutions in the market with a deep taxonomy. I believe we have about 140 different categories at the moment, to help people figure out which tools serve which purposes.
Of those 140, we’re gradually upgrading many of them to what we call “premium,” and we’ve been doing that over the years since we started. That means we do extensive research into the nature of the tools in the category, what they’re designed to do, and notably how AI has changed the landscape.
We’ve been pulling together comprehensive guides for every step of the procurement process. For each premium category, we have a landscape overview, an evaluation framework, a use case, a pilot guide, a requirements template, and then any other information we think is important.
The reason we’re highlighting these updates is, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of work that goes into preparing these documents. At the same time, the legal tech industry is changing so fast in the age of AI. So it’s a significant effort to keep everything updated.
What we’ve done is focus on taking all of the content and categories we’ve had in the past and bringing them up to date, so everyone can see exactly how AI has, or has not, impacted the landscape. Also what is new in the area, how the players have changed, and where mergers and acquisitions have shifted the market.
People should expect to see a lot of this rolling out in the coming weeks. It’s a massive project, and it’s paying off. I’m excited about what we’re doing. So if you are an LTH subscriber, be on the lookout for that. And if you’re not, and you want to learn more about our premium categories and what subscribers get to see, you can visit us at legaltechnologyhub.com and check it out.
Marlene Gebauer (02:06)
Yeah, well, I’m excited to see it too. Thank you, Stephanie.
Stephanie Wilkins (02:09)
Yeah, thanks.
Marlene Gebauer (02:17)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
Greg Lambert (02:24)
And I’m Greg Lambert. And Marlene, today’s guest has one of my favorite titles in legal academia, and that is Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, which to me sounds like someone got promoted to Chief Curator of Smart People Ideas.
Marlene Gebauer (02:37)
Good one.
That’s a great job to have. We are joined by Ray Brescia of Albany Law School. Ray is the Honorable Harold R. Tyler Chair in Law and Technology, and the author of Lawyer 3.0: A Guide to Next Wave Lawyering. This is a book about how the profession changes when technology shifts, what legal work looks like, perfect for our podcast. And it’s also about how clients buy legal services and how law schools train people to deliver them. So Ray, welcome to The Geek in Review.
Ray Brescia (03:14)
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Marlene Gebauer (03:16)
Can’t wait to talk about this.
Greg Lambert (03:17)
Yeah, Ray, before we get into the book, which is the primary reason you’re here, I do have to talk about your title. When someone hears “Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life,” what does your day-to-day look like in real terms? What are you responsible for there at the school?
Ray Brescia (03:39)
Sure, thank you, that’s a great question. And I ask myself that every day. I’m the least dangerous dean. I have no power, I have no budget, I have nothing I can, I can’t strip anyone of their titles or anything like that.
But no, I support the research and scholarship work of my colleagues. Really more as a coach than anything else, and to encourage people, to help draw out their ideas. I don’t need to give a lot of guidance to my colleagues because they’re all pros, but sometimes a little nudge, a little idea, a little reframing if someone is blocked, metaphorically.
And then also, if there are things that might be getting in the way of them doing their best work, I try to block and tackle for them. I really enjoy the work. I love all aspects of my job, but writing is probably my favorite. Although being in the classroom and mentoring students, I’m fortunate to get that opportunity.
So it’s a blend of, like I said, coaching and blocking and tackling. In baseball, we used to have the “player-coach,” right? The guy who’s on the bench, but then goes in at third base every half-inning. I’m kind of a player-coach. Supporting. Yeah, I guess he was a player-coach. He was a player-coach toward the end of his career. That’s right.
Greg Lambert (05:21)
So you’re the Pete Rose of the academic law school. He was there at the end.
Marlene Gebauer (05:23)
Yeah, he was.
Greg Lambert (05:30)
Ray, on that, all the good stuff. Don’t gamble on the work of your peers there, and you’ll be OK. But I’m wondering, thinking about it, because you are this player-coach across the entire bench of the faculty there, do you find that having that spectrum of talking to so many faculty means you see connections? Things one person is doing that relate to something else, or a win somebody gets that you can apply to someone who is stuck?
Marlene Gebauer (06:16)
Where are the connections, if you’re finding any?
Greg Lambert (06:17)
Yeah, that connection.
Ray Brescia (06:19)
Yeah. I think the best support, and I think this applies pretty much anywhere in many contexts, whether it’s students or faculty, is peer-to-peer support. So being a peer myself, but also, if I know what my colleagues are working on and where I can be supportive, or where another colleague could be supportive, if somebody’s trying to figure out a particular issue and I know somebody else has written on that topic, I can connect folks that way.
So being open and transparent about what I’m doing, and trying to understand and support the work of my colleagues, helps to make those connections, both within the law school and also outside of the institution. Albany Law School is celebrating 175 years, the longest-running independent law school in the country.
But we are independent. We don’t have a university beside us supporting us. I do a lot of work with the University at Albany, part of the SUNY system, making interdisciplinary connections. We’ll talk about this, and I talk about it for the profession, particularly in the area of technology. But we also do work in climate change research, game design, and other areas where lawyers and legal scholars can benefit from, and provide insight to, other scholars and professionals, like computer engineers, climate scientists, and people in game design.
So we have some fun, and I do think it’s great to engage in that kind of collaboration. It’s something I think the legal profession doesn’t do enough of and should do more of, and it’s certainly one of the themes of the book.
Marlene Gebauer (08:32)
Yeah. So I want to dig into your other job, which is author. How do you feel the concept of Lawyer 3.0, and the focus on the job of the lawyer and how lawyers work, rather than tools, fits with how lawyers describe their value? Is there a mismatch between the self-described value, the client experience, and the real value? How do you tackle that?
Ray Brescia (08:57)
So let’s start with the frame of Lawyer 3.0. The idea is that I believe we are at a critical inflection point in the profession. The last main inflection point, which created Lawyer 2.0, was at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century.
If you think about the legal profession earlier in the 19th century, it was, as one legal historian described it, a large amorphous bar. After the Jacksonian era, there were few barriers to entry for lawyers if they were white and male. That was pretty much it. Were you a citizen? Did you have the right to vote? You pretty much could become a lawyer, whether you apprenticed with another lawyer, whether you, as Abraham Lincoln did, read the law, took out a loan to get a law library, read Blackstone and a few other books, and hung out a shingle and waited for people to walk into your office down Main Street in your town.
So that’s the ethos of Lawyer 1.0. From colonial times up to the end of the 19th century, that’s what the legal profession was, this large amorphous bar, made up exclusively of white men. Very few barriers to entry.
Then we see urbanization, immigration, mechanization, and we start to see the bar changing. Those low barriers to entry mean women start to join the bar, immigrants start to join the bar, African Americans start to join the bar, and elites in the bar start saying, wait a minute.
Greg Lambert (10:58)
How dare they?
Marlene Gebauer (10:59)
Whoa.
Ray Brescia (11:01)
You know, not so fast. Think of the things you’d hear if you walked down the street and asked someone: when you think about the American legal profession today, what do you think of? Law firms, law schools, bar exams, codes of ethics. These are things we created at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Very few of these items existed.
There was, as we said before at the top of the show, Albany Law School, and a smattering of law schools, law departments at different universities. But then we started to see law schools that gave people training to pass, teaching to the test, minimal bar-exam type barriers people could take. Many states had what was known as diploma privilege. If you had a law school in a state and you gave a diploma to somebody, they could enter the bar.
You had law schools cropping up with correspondence. They were correspondence schools. People could write in, send a check, and they’d get a diploma and they’d be a lawyer. That’s not a great system either, but it gave elites of the bar great pause. So they started to create the institutions we think of as the legal profession today, and that’s Lawyer 2.0.
Technology was a part of that. Technology, like today, drove the practice of law in a lot of different ways. It changed what lawyers did because of trusts and railroads and oil and manufacturing. Lawyers had to ramp up efficiency. They formed law firms to provide services to corporate clients. They started to incorporate the telephone and the telegraph, and even the typewriter. Rapid reproduction of judicial decisions changed how lawyers practice. You couldn’t just walk into court and make noises about general principles, “Your Honor,” and your adversary would be citing cases, which was a change for a lot of lawyers.
So we made it harder to become a lawyer. We made it more expensive. The ABA, together with the Association of American Law Schools. The ABA gets started in 1878 in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York by elites in the bar who summered in Saratoga. Literally, that’s who created the ABA. The Association of American Law Schools gets created in 1900 by the more established law schools, and they combine forces to make law school, number one, a requirement for bar admission, and number two, more expensive to attend. It’s more years, no more correspondence courses. You have to have full-time faculty. You have to have libraries. We created more difficult bar exams.
So we transformed the practice of law, partly because of changes in technology, but also immigration and urbanization. Fast forward to today. Technology is transforming the practice of law. We’ve had technology creeping in, email and scheduling and legal research. About 20 years ago, we started using technology to scan massive amounts with OCR in discovery. But now, I think generative AI and predictive analytics are going to make a significant change to the practice of law.
I’ll stop there, because that was long-winded, but you asked a five-part question.
Greg Lambert (15:34)
Yeah. Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (15:38)
No, that’s true. Thank you for setting the stage, because I don’t know if all our listeners know the history, and it helps shape your thoughts about where we’re going.
Greg Lambert (15:38)
Now we brought that on ourselves.
Ray, one of the things you talk about in the book is a client’s “job to be done.” Talk to us about that concept, and how it changes how a practicing lawyer determines what legal services to offer now, and how to scope it.
Ray Brescia (16:17)
Sure. It comes from the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. He’s famous for coining the phrase “disruptive innovation.” But the “jobs to be done” framework, I love this story. It emerged from a milkshake study. A fast food restaurant wanted to know why people were buying milkshakes a couple of times during the day, in the morning, mid-afternoon, and at the end of the day. He interviewed customers to find out why they were buying a milkshake, particularly in the morning. I like a good milkshake, but first thing in the morning is kind of weird, a little too sweet, right?
Greg Lambert (16:40)
Shake.
Ray Brescia (16:47)
Why people were buying milkshakes, you know, a couple of times during the day.
Greg Lambert (17:11)
Pour it on your… sh… Pour it on your cereal.
Ray Brescia (17:14)
Exactly. And what does ELF say the five food groups are? Candy cane, candy corn, right?
Marlene Gebauer (17:18)
Sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar.
Ray Brescia (17:34)
The morning shift in particular was for people in their commute. They wanted to pick up something quick, something that would keep them engaged. It took a long time to drink. You could drink it through a straw, holding it in one hand. Other things like a muffin, you get crumbs all over. A banana, who’s going to eat a banana in the car?
And the afternoon, the evening, same thing. The afternoon was parents picking up their kids, wanting to give their kids something to do. The parents get a little break so they can make the transition from whatever they were doing during the day to now they’ve got their kids.
So the idea is, what were customers hiring a milkshake to do? What problem were they trying to solve? That’s the jobs-to-be-done framework. If you purchase a good or a service, what job are you trying to satisfy? What job are you trying to get done?
Apply that to the legal context. Customers, clients of lawyers, what are they hiring a lawyer to do? Solve their legal problem. Not to have a lawyer for the sake of having a lawyer. Another business school story is: why do people buy a quarter-inch drill? Because they want a quarter-inch drill, or because they want a quarter-inch hole? So what job are people hiring lawyers to do? Solve their legal problems.
Greg Lambert (19:32)
Yeah, and I’ve heard it framed as not legal problems, but business problems, personal problems, family problems. They don’t see it through a legal lens.
So let’s say I’m in charge of intake at my firm and I want to wipe it out and start over. How do we use the jobs-to-be-done framework to rebuild an intake cycle?
Marlene Gebauer (19:39)
Business problems.
Ray Brescia (20:10)
A couple of things. You said something important. A customer or client wants their business problem solved, or their border dispute with their neighbor, like a property line dispute.
One issue, and I think this is endemic in American culture, is that a lot of tensions in our culture and our lives are legal in nature. There’s a legal issue that could solve a problem. There are scholars who write about too much law, that we are shrouded in law. The law is all around. There’s a lot of legal stuff out there.
One of the issues that accompanies that is laypeople don’t always realize they have a legal problem, or a problem a lawyer can solve. There’s a marketing issue, and I don’t mean to diminish it, but helping people understand they have a legal problem in the first place is an important first step. It may not be great to explain they have a legal problem if they can’t afford a lawyer, don’t know how to access a lawyer, or only know a friend of a friend who knows a lawyer.
So a job for lawyers is to help people understand they have a problem that might be legal in nature. There’s a legal scholar, Rebecca Sandefur, and she’s done research showing a lot of people either don’t know they have a legal problem, or they think it’s God’s will, or they go to a neighbor or friend for help.
So getting people to understand they have a legal problem is a task of Lawyer 3.0.
Now, assume we have a customer who understands they have a legal problem and should go to a lawyer, and has the means. How do you approach that client? The way we’ve approached clients for a century is the client walks in and we assess their legal needs and create what Richard Susskind calls a bespoke suite of services, custom-made for each client.
In reality, lawyers don’t really do that. Depending on your area, someone walks in, you assess their case, they walk out, and you think you’re developing a bespoke approach. But what lawyers often do is say, Mary’s case is a lot like Maureen’s case from three weeks ago. Let me start with what I did for Maureen, change the names, and work from there. At the same time, we do tailor the response to client needs.
One way to reframe how lawyers operate, to make practice more efficient and effective, is to have products and triage clients to meet the products you have. Develop a Model T approach to some legal problems. You can present options: a product that is less expensive than the one with all the bells and whistles, and should satisfy most needs adequately. Here are the risks. Or we can develop a bespoke approach, and here’s what it costs.
We can talk about examples of organizations doing this already.
Marlene Gebauer (25:24)
What’s one you think is pretty exemplary?
Greg Lambert (25:27)
A good…
Ray Brescia (25:28)
There’s a great program called Citizenship Works, which I highlight in the book. It’s developed by Pro Bono Net. Citizenship Works walks people through applying for citizenship. It goes through steps, assessing whether somebody is eligible to apply for citizenship, whether there are barriers, and it generates the application if there are no red flags.
There will be a percentage of people who would go to an immigration lawyer with a straightforward case. Those people can go through the Citizenship Works process, and if no red flags are raised along the way, they get completed forms.
Think of it as TurboTax. Lawyers long ago ceded simple tax preparation to tax preparers and online tools like TurboTax. I can see a TurboTaxification of different areas of law, less expensive. Building those expert systems is expensive up front, but they have a long tail, and you make it up over time with volume.
If a user raises red flags in their application, the system sees that, and as long as the person is answering accurately and honestly, it identifies the red flags and says, hey, you need to talk to an immigration lawyer. There’s an issue here that needs more expertise than the system provides. That’s one example of an expert system, and I think lawyers can build more.
Marlene Gebauer (27:55)
So I want to dive into limited scope services. What does that mean? Is it productization, or something different?
Ray Brescia (28:09)
Limited scope representation has been around since lawyers started opening their mouths. Whether at a cocktail party or in your office on Main Street, giving basic guidance to someone who doesn’t want full representation. Sometimes the lawyer says, this isn’t a big deal, do this, do that, come back if there’s a problem.
We’ve codified it now in the rules to formally allow limited scope representation. If the limited scope is reasonable and explained to the client.
A paradigmatic example is lawyer-for-the-day programs. In some housing courts, high volume and low representation rates, particularly for low-income tenants, lawyer for the day will be in housing court and the client has the lawyer for the day. Usually the lawyer won’t go to trial for the tenant. Very few landlord-tenant cases go to trial. They’re often settled. The lawyer can help navigate the settlement process and make sure rights are protected.
But that’s it. At the end of the day, literally and metaphorically, the lawyer for the day turns back into a fully operational and expensive lawyer. If they can’t resolve the case, the tenant goes on, the case is probably adjourned, and the tenant will not have representation on the return date. But often the lawyer can resolve the case and reach a settlement where the tenant’s rights are protected and the landlord’s interests are advanced. It’s a constructive, common situation.
Marlene Gebauer (30:51)
So, say they don’t resolve it and the person is cut loose. How does the lawyer explain that without the client feeling abandoned?
Ray Brescia (31:23)
The rules require that if you enter into this limited scope arrangement, the scope must be reasonable, and the client must understand and give informed consent.
Let’s talk about reasonable scope. You could say, look, I’m a criminal defense lawyer and my specialty is plea bargains. I’m at the tail end of my career. If you pay my fee, all I do is plea bargains. The best plea bargains are settled on the eve of trial. My limited scope is I represent you in this high-stakes matter where you could go to jail for 20 years, but if we can’t get a plea agreement, then I will, as you say, Marlene, abandon you. That would be an unreasonable scope.
Marlene Gebauer (32:32)
[crosstalk]
Ray Brescia (32:44)
Because the client is left in the lurch the night before trial and the lawyer says, well, I did my best. Good luck. That’s unreasonable. So it has to be reasonable.
Greg Lambert (32:59)
See you in 20 years.
Ray Brescia (33:10)
It also has to be explained. I talk about “first, do no harm.” Limited scope can’t leave the client worse off than if they had no assistance. In landlord-tenant, or other high-volume cases like consumer debt or bankruptcy, limited guidance can give a playbook beyond what the lawyer can do in the moment, whether trying to settle or file a petition.
The judge generally has to be made aware of the limited scope arrangement. In bankruptcy, you’d make clear you’re appearing only for filing a petition. In landlord-tenant, “Your Honor, we’re here to try to settle, but if it doesn’t settle, the scope of my representation is only to try to settle.” So everyone is aware.
Client has to understand and give informed consent. As a principle, you shouldn’t leave the client worse off than if you didn’t provide assistance.
Greg Lambert (34:44)
We’ve talked about individual lawyers and folks who have hung their shingle. How do you apply Lawyer 3.0 to a full-service firm like Marlene and I work in? How does it work in a larger law firm?
Ray Brescia (35:11)
I have a chapter on full-service 3.0 lawyering. We’re already seeing some of it, like making discovery more efficient. People are using generative AI to produce first drafts of documents. That’s all it’s good for right now, not last drafts.
Every day we’re hearing about AI hallucinations working their way into the legal bloodstream, and I don’t understand how it keeps happening every day. You have to be careful.
Marlene Gebauer (35:52)
It’s called laziness. It’s called not checking your citations.
Ray Brescia (35:58)
Not checking your citations. There’s going to be pressure on large law firms to adopt tools to make work more efficient and effective. In-house offices are bringing more work in-house using generative AI and other AI tools.
Some large AI companies are marketing directly to in-house counsel departments, saying, we can help you bring more work in-house. So there’s a real thread out there.
Greg Lambert (36:38)
Yeah. There are hallucinations in those that come to us as well.
Ray Brescia (36:42)
Oh, 100%. Absolutely. It’s risky at this point. But we can look for efficiencies, make work go faster, be less costly to clients. There’s going to be pressure from clients.
It’s like the phrase doctors fear: “Doc, I was on WebMD last night, and I’m certain I have Legionnaires’ disease.” We’re going to see the legal version, and we’re seeing it now. Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen got in trouble. He forwarded some research he did, I think on ChatGPT, to his lawyers. He said, here are cases to support my position. They dropped them into a brief and they were fake.
I don’t mean to criticize him, but it keeps happening and I don’t understand it. As you said, laziness. We should know by now this is risky. Clients are coming to lawyers saying, I did research on ChatGPT and I think I can win. Here are the cases. And the lawyer starts.
Marlene Gebauer (38:39)
Here’s the first draft of the document. Take it from here. Check and make sure it’s good.
Ray Brescia (38:41)
Yeah. We’re seeing people use ChatGPT. It’s almost like my grandmother called the refrigerator “Frigidaire.” We talk about GenAI as ChatGPT, but GenAI more generally.
Research shows even the databases maintained by commercial legal research companies that use AI can hallucinate. These models are described as the most sycophantic intern you’ve ever had, who wants an answer because they want to please you, regardless of whether it’s correct.
I use these tools every day, usually as an outline or to answer a quick question, but I always double-check because it’s often a tick or two off. I was asked to do a presentation on a paper I prepared. I asked a tool, give me a summary of the paper I wrote. And it was wrong. I only knew because I wrote the underlying document.
Greg Lambert (40:19)
That’s why I tell attorneys, when they first use generative AI, use it on something you know backwards and forwards. You’ll spot what it’s good at and what it’s not.
Ray Brescia (40:27)
Absolutely.
Marlene Gebauer (40:28)
Yeah, so you can check it.
Ray Brescia (40:33)
Some things it’s great for. I was working with a couple of other law schools. We were trying to develop a course across a couple law schools on issues lawyers in a rural practice in upstate New York face. That’s idiosyncratic. Farmers deal with licensing for renewable energy contracts. There are issues around creating a farm store, creating a brewery, all sorts of things.
I asked it to come up with a 14-week syllabus for a survey course for rural law practitioners in upstate New York. In minutes, it produced 14 weeks of subject matter. It was amazing. Would I take it and say, OK students, here’s the course? No. But it was a head start.
Marlene Gebauer (41:35)
So I want to jump in on that. What critical steps are often overlooked by lawyers and firms when early AI use is messy? What guardrails should be in place? What process should be in place to check hallucinations? What steps should firms or attorneys be doing, but maybe aren’t?
Ray Brescia (42:02)
I don’t know what they’re not doing, but it surprises me we see these problems every day and some practitioners aren’t checking the work. It’s minimum competence. You need to check that the laws you’re citing exist, the cases are real, and they say what you say they say.
When I started as a legal aid lawyer, we had handed-down briefs on issues. I was taught you have to have read every case you cite. I went back to the original sources in those briefs and thought, wow, this doesn’t say what the brief says it says. Those briefs had passed their sell-by date.
That’s basic competence. You can use these tools as a head start, an outline, some arguments, maybe even cases you wouldn’t find otherwise, but you have to do the background research and make sure it’s accurate.
I practiced in courts where it wasn’t uncommon to have an opinion that was not otherwise reported, “NOR.” You might append a copy of that NOR decision to your brief. Look at Mata v. Avianca, the big first case out of the Southern District on AI hallucinations. The judge added an appendix with the cases as presented by the lawyers, because the lawyers submitted not only citations, but appended opinions. If you were used to NOR opinions, you’d say, this looks legit.
I told people we’re not far from judges citing hallucinated cases because they’re in briefs, minute orders, draft orders, proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law. Judges said, no, that will never happen. And of course it happened.
There’s risk of wasting judicial and litigant resources tracking down fake cases, but the bigger risk is they get transmogrified by a judge citing them, then they look legitimate. So you have to do the homework.
Marlene Gebauer (45:42)
Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (45:53)
Good. You teed me up for our crystal ball question. Looking three to five years out, what’s the biggest structural shift you expect in how legal services are delivered?
Ray Brescia (46:07)
Bill Gates is fond of saying we overestimate the changes that happen in two years and underestimate those that happen over 10. We’re at about the three-year mark on GenAI. I remember people saying it was the end of the legal profession. As Mark Twain said, the news of my death is greatly exaggerated. The legal profession isn’t dead, but it is changing.
I think we’re going to see more TurboTaxification, creating more commoditized legal services that are less expensive, easier to deliver, and satisfy clients’ jobs to be done. Organizations that get out in front of that curve are going to be successful.
Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation idea is also instructive. When new technologies come online, incumbent firms tend to cede the lower end of a market. The new technologies, with fewer bells and whistles, satisfy the needs of the lower end. Then they grab more market share as the technology improves and providers learn how to serve a greater share.
Individuals, firms, companies, nonprofits that figure out how to use tools to bring more legal service to people at scale will change how legal services are delivered for many people.
Richard Susskind says there is a latent legal market. I think that’s accurate. Ninety-three percent of low-income people and roughly fifty percent of middle-income people in America face legal problems without a lawyer. One main reason is cost. The entity that figures out how to deliver meaningful, effective legal services at scale will tap a blue-ocean opportunity where legal services providers don’t exist now.
Then there’s what law schools can do. Help people understand the technology, the risks and benefits, and how to create systems that deliver effective legal services at scale, “just in time,” “just enough” services that address jobs to be done. That requires more interdisciplinary work. I don’t think every student should take coding for lawyers. I think students should partner with people who code, and educate engineers on how law offices work and what ethical obligations lawyers have. Lawyers should understand what the technology can do. Those interdisciplinary partnerships are essential for Lawyer 3.0.
Greg Lambert (50:05)
Ray Brescia, the author of Lawyer 3.0 and professor with an outstanding title at Albany Law School, thank you for coming on. This has been a great conversation.
Marlene Gebauer (50:17)
Yeah, thank you, Ray.
Ray Brescia (50:18)
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
Marlene Gebauer (50:20)
And thanks to all of you, our listeners, for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn.
Greg Lambert (50:29)
Ray, where should listeners go to pick up your book, Lawyer 3.0?
Ray Brescia (50:34)
Online bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, wherever you get your books. As an academic press, it’s not in a lot of bookstores physically, but you can find it online.
Greg Lambert (50:49)
Awesome.
Marlene Gebauer (50:51)
Great.
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeSica. Thank you, Jerry, and goodbye, everybody.
Greg Lambert (50:56)
Bye.